SPONSORED EDITORIAL
KAMBI
SPORTSBOOK FOCUS
Understanding sportsbooks
As the sportsbook market becomes more crowded, and the rise of mobile and in-play betting possibilities has swelled the pro?ts available, the pressure is on operators to ensure they have the best sportsbook products possible. Part of this comes down to an intuitive understanding of the customer, so to ?nd out more, eGaming Review talks to Kristian Nylen, CEO of Kambi. eGaming Review (eGR): In what ways can partnering with a software provider like Kambi be bene?cial to a company’s business strategy and brands? Kristian Nylen (KN): Kambi has one of the most competitive B2B multi-channel managed sportsbook offerings in the global market place today. Increasingly businesses that have not invested heavily in developing their sportsbook offering are ?nding it very difficult to compete in the marketplace and are losing market share. Consumers are demanding a multi-channel sportsbook experience, mobile access, rapid pay-outs, lots of choice and minimal fuss. At Kambi we enable organisations to compete with the very best sportsbooks while reducing operational costs and the risk of running such an operation in-house. Once the Kambi fully-managed service sportsbook is integrated, organisations can begin to focus on their core activities of customer acquisition and marketing and can let us take care of managing the sportsbooks. In our ?rst year with Paf, its sportsbook turnover increased by 210%. eGR: What differentiates Kambi from its competitors? KN: We are seeing that many organisations understand the revenue potential of having a market leading sportsbook brand, but at the same time, they do not have the expertise, scale, experience and investment capacity to compete or continue to run their own inhouse operation in a way that enables them to deliver a decent margin to the parent company. Kambi has the scale to help these brands truly compete at a very low commercial risk. Also, Kambi has core expertise and focus on re-regulated markets, helping our clients to navigate these newly legislated arenas. Kambi’s technical agility and accelerated deployment programme enables revenue streams to ?ow quickly and allows businesses to capture early market share. eGR: In what ways can Kambi’s experience in the industry be of assistance when trying to keep costs down? KN: Kambi’s sportsbook has been developed during the past 15 years through continuous investment in technology, people and infrastructure. For some time now, the trend has been steering towards automation of live betting using algorithms to assess probabilities. Automation is a core part of our strategy, but we do not believe that automation alone can provide the end users with the best experience or the operator with the best returns. Our traders’ skill and expertise, combined with advanced technology and our unique pro?ling and automation programme, sets us apart. eGR: In what ways can customer management be bene?cial to a business and how does Kambi carry out player analysis? KN: Sportsbetting is unique among popular forms of gambling as there are a small group of well-informed players that will win money from the operator in the long term. As such, the person who wants to place the bet is every bit as important as the outcome chosen. Both are vital considerations in any trading decision and successful operators will aim to give traders as much information as possible to help them make optimal decisions. The aim is not only to maximise stakes from pro?table players while minimising stakes from unpro?table players, but also to ensure that by correctly pro?ling players, traders are able to extract information from bets that are requested, feed this back into the odds and so develop more accurate prices. Clearly, operators need to ?nd a way of forecasting the future pro?tability of players, but typically this has been done in an almost arbitrary fashion. While a player’s current margin is a useful piece of information, it is far from the whole story, particularly at an early stage of a player’s betting career – there is a luck factor in the short-term, which affects a player’s returns on his bets. We have developed advanced algorithms, based on statistical and quantitative analysis that are able to accurately forecast a player’s future pro?tability. Kambi is con?dent that with our market-leading customer management techniques, we are able to extract a higher lifetime value from any group of players than any other operator.
Kristian Nylen started in the gaming industry with Unibet in 2000 as an odds compiler. In late 2009 he launched Kambi as a special project for Unibet, and he became CEO when K [X?H ?\? ?] \ ??\?]H\?[?[?\[?[???\[?H[? ? L ?????????Y?XY?^?[?K???B??