JENS VON BAHR INTERVIEW
company will have the exclusive rights to a “very prominent television [game] show” taking it to the live gaming space; the second will be to move its offering to mobile but giving particular attention to the iPad; while the third will be a move into social gaming, an opportunity several online operators have only just woken up to. Von Bahr is not discounting moving directly at some stage to the Facebook platform, but initially, he explains, this will involve entering the social space via a joint venture where Evolution will provide its live casino while its undisclosed “gaming content provider” partner, a business that he says is “already integrated with Facebook”, will do the rest. He says it may have the “most beautiful live roulette in the world” but that to succeed in social you have to have the “right mechanism” to enable customers to access the “next world”, something that “needs to be tailored to suit the needs of players in order for it to become pro?table on social platforms”, he adds.
Q&A
eGaming Review (eGR): Tell us how it all began Jens Von Bahr (JvB): We started the business in 2006 recognising there was a gap in the European marketplace. At the time live dealer operations were very successful and pro?table primarily in Asia, but they weren't recognised as a product any of the brand name operators wanted to become associated with in Europe. We asked ourselves and the market why and they all said the same: it’s operated from non-regulated environments, the quality of the video feed is poor, the perception is that operations are not professional, and that was it for them. When we founded the company it was to capitalise on that gap and to eliminate all the mental hurdles these operators had. Consequently we set up the ?rst televised studio in the EU in Riga and quickly obtained certi?cation from Alderney. Then we started to signi?cantly invest in both operations and development of software. eGR: Where was the investment from? JvB: Private UK backers. I’m not allowed to mention their names but they’re English billionaires that seed funded the business. They made their fortunes in property so this was not their area of expertise, but they believed in us and our vision and they were right to do so. The initial aggregated investment is north of €15m in software and roughly €7-8m in studio operations. The barriers to entry might not be gigantic but the barriers to success are. If you compare it with poker, liquidity is key, while in live dealer it is also very important to satisfy a range of customer demands. The true gambler always needs a choice. We operate more than 60 tables today, we’re going to launch 17 new tables this quarter and with that we’re at least 500% bigger than the nearest competitor in Europe. eGR: You have signed a number of ‘localised’ deals in Holland and Italy; explain why you think this is a particularly important move in live dealer? JvB: The trends are clear that in this increasingly competitive industry operators are always looking for differentiation. Localisation is key in every market where you have a presence. There’s so much more you can do in interactive media with real time video rather than normal virtual design, but equally in an increasingly digitalised world human interaction has a greater role to play. To attract true gamblers you need to offer them choice. If they’ve been unlucky on one roulette table they need to move on and change and you want those options to be as many as possible, the same way in which you deal with high rollers in a land-based casino. When you need to have a localised offering, particularly in a newly regulated market, the most important offering for any of these operators is by far and away live. In Spain, it’s exclusively going to be live table games, and potentially only live roulette that will be allowed to begin with. There are several reasons for this but one is that regulators have licensed local land-based casinos for decades. For them to regulate live is so much easier
“The barriers to entry might not be gigantic but the barriers to success are”
Live dealer casino is the fastest growing sector in online gambling, according to Von Bahr
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