AMELCO Amelco Power Behind the Price


Paul Manning, CEO of Amelco – Europe’s tier-one sportsbook of choice for Flutter, GVC and Betstars – sat down with GIO ahead of G2E to talk through the launch of Amelco USA and bringing one of the market’s most successful sportsbooks stateside.


GIO: Paul, tell us a little about Amelco’s journey. PM: Our initial concept was to provide sportsbook modules that would allow our customers to pick what they needed from us in any areas that they wanted to improve their sportsbook offering.


This could stretch from algos or feeds for any sports market to risk management. Our idea was to integrate any of those into any sportsbook – and in turn, make it more efficient and profitable for our clients. We’ve spent the last 12 years developing our product and gone through multiple generations of our platform to arrive at the complete end-to-end, packaged delivery we offer clients today.


The end result we have now is the option for every one of our modules to either fit together or be supplied separately – allowing a flexible offering that can suit any bespoke sportsbook need.


GIO: What industry challenges was Amelco initially trying to overcome? PM: The opportunity we saw as Amelco began to develop was the chance to bring the experience we had in low-latency and high-volume trading to sports betting. Automated trading was also emerging at the time, and we wanted to be the first to bring that over. Not only would it allow our customers to scale their business at speed – but also differentiate themselves from other operators by offering more sports, and more markets.


We got in just as the demand for in-play and the amount of content on offer was exploding, and I


suppose we were a large part of making that happen. As I’m sure many remember, the functions of bookmaking back then involved separate and manual effort – just showing how these could be streamlined was a challenge in itself.


GIO: When did you begin your US operations? PM: We launched Amelco USA in 2018; a 50-50 joint venture with experienced gaming executive and investor Rob Miller, who has invested $1billion-plus in the US gaming industry. He has deep roots in the tribal gaming environment, alongside Amelco USA president Rob Bone, who will be leading business development stateside.


To have a robust platform and very capable product feature set, which Amelco USA does, and then to also bring the ability to offer flexible commercial terms, is a very compelling value proposition for customers to consider – and we’re looking forward to capitalising on our initial success in the US.


One core value has been to practice what we preach


GIO: What have your initial successes been so far? PM: We have signed a number of non-exclusive agreements – including one with Sportradar – and we’re also set to announce the launch of sportsbooks for several tribal casinos in the coming months. We’re already licensed in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and have been pulling together our solution as one package that we’re able to get to our customers very quickly. In effect, it is a complete end-to-end solution that we think is absolutely perfect for going


96 OCTOBER 2019 GIO


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