Can you tell us about your background? You bring plenty of experience from sports betting.
I've been doing some sort of sports betting and iGaming for the last 19 years. I joined a company called SBTech about 11 years ago. I was leading it all the way to the merger with DraftKings. Later on, I started my own ventures and now here we are, with First - Best in Sports.
There are a lot of years of experience between myself and the team. [We have] over 500 employees. Out of them, over 200 are live traders, providing tier-one B2B sports betting for operators.
It's a very competitive space. But, as you mentioned, you're billing yourselves as First - Best in Sports. How are you looking to differentiate and use those resources to stand out in the market?
In my opinion, the B2B sports betting market today is not a very competitive space. Look at the whole iGaming industry; casinos, live dealer, casino aggregators, CRM, PAM platforms. And, if you look at the top tier operators, like bet365, Betano, DraftKings, FanDuel, Pinnacle, they're all using B2B providers. They're all using casinos like Pragmatic Play and Playtech and PG. They use Evolution for live casino, casino aggregators, the same payment solutions, PAMs, etc. Each and every one of them is not using a B2B sports betting provider, which doesn't make logical sense.
At a certain stage, you need to level up to have your own engine, to be able to control your own trading, risk management, product features, gamification, bet builders, markets, cash out, early payouts, etc. All the features and functionalities that tier-one sportsbooks are offering, you want to offer
Logical sense would be one strong tier-one B2B sports betting provider that invests everything in the sports betting product and provides to multiple operators. That makes financial sense. For every tier-one operator to build its own sportsbook from scratch is like me building a whole 500-meter gym just for me. It makes no financial sense.
The reason it's happening is because the B2B sports betting market today is not competitive. The products in the market today are not being selected by tier-one operators. They're always below what you see with tier-one. You’ll see sports betting providers unable to really compete with the internal products of bet365 or Betano or DraftKings.
The message of First is clear and easy. We offer the sports betting product that, as an operator, you can compete with all the top tier-one's on product and sports, which you're not able to do with any other providers. For example, if I'm a new local operator and I want to compete with bet365 on slots, I can also get the same slots they have. If I want to compete with them on live dealer, I can also get Evolution like they have. But, if I want to compete with them in sports, the obvious choice was to go with one of the B2B providers, which is a lower tier; second, third, fourth tier. Now with First - Best in Sports, you can compete with these giants head-to-head with a tier-one sports betting product.
Given that thesis, what are you offering in terms of the product that backs that up, that meets the standards the operators need?
We are our own sports betting engine. You'll see most providers out there not doing their own sports. They'll use a product like an MTS or other sportsbooks. They'll create a front-end run and call themselves a sportsbook company. Which is fine. I'm happy for those companies. It's good as a gateway into sports. At First - Best in Sports, we usually don't take startups. We want someone who's more experienced. I think these companies do us a lot of service by helping different small casino operators and startups enter the sports betting market. But, at a certain stage, you need to level up to have your own engine, to be able to control your own trading, risk management, product features, gamification, bet builders, markets, cash out, early payouts, etc. All the features and functionalities that tier-one sportsbooks are offering, you want to offer.
On the back end, you want to have a very strong engine. What I see today in the market is [casino operators] offer non-competitive odds to be safe. They're trading, the risk management is not as good, but it's not very attractive to users. The real users, the smart users, the punters, they're looking for competitive odds. We see now with some of our operators, such as bet7K.com, a Brazilian operator that switched from another provider to us, offers odds on the main leagues are higher than Betano, and it's ROI positive. It's able to offer extremely high payouts. We're increasing its volume, rollover, turnover, and we're providing it with proper risk management and trading. We're giving it a positive margin and increased lifetime value per player on a monthly basis.
In my opinion, the B2B sports betting market today is not a very competitive space
What are the biggest trends players want to see at the moment?
There's a big shift towards everything revolving around bet builders. Specifically, for bet builders, what users want to see are predefined bet builders, because to set up your own bet builders is interesting, but it can be tedious. I have to go into bet builder mode. I have to start selecting the right bets, finding things that connect with each other in a way that's going to be interesting for me. If I'm going to connect the bet builder and say, OK, I want to have over 2.5 goals and X amount of drawings per team, and let's say they're both 3.0 and 3.0, I'll get odds of 9. Why? Because their correlation value is zero, right? But, if I'm going to connect Miami to win and Messi to score, these have a very high correlation. If [these are both] 3.0, I'm not going to get odds of 9. I'm going to get odds of 3.x because the correlation is very strong.
But, correlation does not just go from 0 to 1. It also goes from 0 to -1. What if I do Miami to win and Messi to score none? Then the odds should be higher than 9. It's reverse correlation. It should be 12.
The whole mathematics around bet builders is very important. We also have what we call predefined bet builders. We're creating these on a daily, hourly basis; bet builders for players that, at the click of a button, get an interesting bet builder they want to see on upcoming featured matches. We allow operators to create these types of bet builders as well for their players.
For the full interview, check out the latest edition of The Huddle.
