The last time we spoke you were the Head of Sales at OddsMatrix. How have things changed in that year and what experience did you have in your previous role that you were able to implement here?
As the Head of Sales at OddsMatrix, I was focused on the OddsMatrix sportsbook, the vision and the products. The whole company, ever since I joined four years ago, was always collaborative. I'm always going to say that I've worked in different industries, different companies and I think the camaraderie between the salespeople in EveryMatrix is second to none.
I've managed to pick up a lot of knowledge and expertise from my colleagues from different business units, but I was always focused on sport. My personal preference is always going to be sports. I like talking about sports because it resonates with me. I'm also a punter, so I understand the ecosystem from placing a bet, and from the provider side as well.
With this new role, we're opening up all the verticals to a team of very experienced people that have the market know-how, the network, that know what they're talking about and who they're talking to. For me it’s a lot more comfortable talking to the operators, because if they're not interested in sports or they're satisfied with their current provider, and they would like to know more about casino, I don't have to introduce a colleague of mine to talk. I can lead that conversation and switch the conversation naturally.
There are a lot of segments within the EveryMatrix ecosystem. As the Global Commercial Director for EveryMatrix, how do you implement commercial strategies while keeping each segment individual?
It's difficult. There's pros and cons to unifying a company and having a single unitary ecosystem where decisions are made on top and everything is propagated below. Nobody has invented the perfect recipe. It's all down to what kind of people you have and what kind of mindset you're putting in. It's an evolving process. I've been here for four years and things have changed so much. Let alone the number of people, but also the processes of how we do things and how we approach things. What we're trying to do is have that wide palette of potential products, but also make sure they communicate with each other.
Moving forward, we're always going to be in limbo between a centralised and decentralised company, but there are a lot of benefits we're gaining from having this. I always say when I'm talking to different operators: I've seen a lot of B2B providers that would have a company, a provider, and then there's a lot of commercial people management, project management, all these layers in between an operator and the actual developer creating something for that operator. More often than not you would have the same developer integrating a payment method and developing their cash out, so you're going to have a bottleneck on one end or another. The problem for the operator is that they have different stakeholders for those two things, right? So, at end of the day you end up in a situation where both of them are not satisfied and the team that are doing this cannot cope. It brings a lot of bad traction. With EveryMatrix we have our business units, focused, specialised people that can get deep into the matter and solve things.
What we wouldn’t do with most of those established names is, for example, tell Caesars, scrap your technology – come to us and we'll give you everything. That’s not how it works. They need to develop trust
So far, I think the set up we have is really good. You can see it in the numbers, you can see it in the mood of the people. But, you never know what the future is going to bring, so we're very careful about what we do and how we move forward.
When it comes to EveryMatrix's various platforms, how do you go about figuring out the needs of each specific client and sending them the products that are right for them?
We try to unify everything. When we say EveryMatrix platform, it's an ecosystem of different products, but as Ebbe mentioned in his presentation, we could have bolted in the horseracing product from FSB and keep that legacy, then surely at one point in the future it was going to bite us. What we did is take the longer route and build it within our ecosystem so it's easier for us to maintain, add features and bridge for our operators.
When it comes to specific clients and their needs, we're becoming more and more oriented to what our partners are giving us as feedback. We're working with bigger clients, tier ones, people who have decades of experience in the market, players that know their business. So, we're getting a lot of useful feedback from them and developing items that they requested, that their players are requesting.
We're also keeping our small R&D departments in every business unit, doing proactive innovation, edgy stuff. A good example is a bet simulator we did with sportsbook, which came from what we saw someone do in the market. We took a look under the hood and realised, we can do this. It wasn't a requirement from any of our partners, but when we started talking to them and showing them what we did, everybody was amazed and they wanted to give it a go. That's the balance; apart from being centralistic or decentralistic, you also have to be careful so that you're not a service provider and development provider without any innovative spark.
When you create your commercial strategies, they have to change for every jurisdiction that you're in. What sort of research do you have to conduct before you launch a new location?
There's a lot that goes into it. I think this is very underestimated in the industry, how much work and effort a provider has to do to break into a new regulated market, with all the rules and intricacies and specifics. We've done a lot over the years, especially in markets that we're in such as Norway, Germany, even Greece. Croatia is also a difficult market from a regulatory and compliance standpoint, but the thing is, you need to prepare yourself in order to break in and it gets progressively more difficult the more markets you have to cover. It's not only about getting into the market but maintaining that market, because regulators in certain markets don't care about what's happening anywhere else. They are bringing new measures, new laws, new regulation that keeps you on your toes forever.
So if you had, let's say, a technical compliance team running through all the projects, by the time you get to 30 markets, it's already a much bigger team that has to do this on a constant day-to-day basis. Every new update and regulation in Greece, Germany, Peru or wherever we're located can actually mean we are jeopardising our business and our partner's business by not being compliant. It's a process. You cannot grow too fast because otherwise you'll do it wrong, so it's gradual.
If they're not interested in sports or they're satisfied with their current provider, and they would like to know more about casino, I don't have to introduce a colleague of mine to talk. I can lead that conversation and switch the conversation naturally
But, before entering a specific regulated market, we do our best to understand the ins and outs. This is why our commercial set up is now moving a lot more into a regional focus so that every person within the commercial team has their part of the world that they understand, in terms of regulation, in terms of the laws that are active and the ones that might be coming up. This not only helps the company make a better decision on whether or not a market is worth it, but also brings value to the conversations with the operators. If I don't know anything about the history, the regulated market before, I’m just not a worthwhile person to talk to. That's a fact. I think operators, on the level we're targeting now, tier ones, can read if you're coming through with a general sales pitch without taking into consideration their day-to-day struggles in the market.
Speaking of tier-one operators, you recently partnered with Caesars. What is it like partnering with a big legacy brand? I've heard from others, when you partner with big brands, it can be a slow process...
I wasn't on the project, but on behalf of my colleagues working with these big brands, of course it takes time, even for something small or insignificant. For them, it’s a part of the system, its a process they have to go through. Luckily, this industry is not still in the same ballpark as banking and telecommunications, so it's not as difficult. But, we're getting there bit-by-bit, not only from the B2C side but also from the B2B side.
What we wouldn’t do with most of those established names is, for example, tell Caesars, scrap your technology – come to us and we'll give you everything. That’s not how it works. They need to develop trust. They need to see you deliver on these projects, that you’re committed. Slowly, you open up more conversations and start talking about bigger projects.
Caesars is one of them, but we have a whole parade of different brands that have been around for decades. Some of them are huge, that we're doing in specific markets, for specific projects, and there's more to come.
What do you suspect will be the biggest challenges to affect the gaming industry this year?
I don't think it's a challenge that's going to jeopardise the industry. But, from my personal standpoint, one thing I really don't understand is how we're not moving at a faster pace into personalisation. When you use TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, all the media sites, all the e-commerce sites that you visit, you're using are your own personal bubble, your own universe. You are the only person in the world that gets this layout.
Everything's catered to the end customer, whereas in our industry, this has not become a thing yet for one reason or another. It's not that we don't have modern technology – we've been developing stuff that's cutting edge – but for one reason or another, even for the biggest operators out there, it doesn't matter who the player is, it's all the same. It's not catering to the young customer especially, because for both casino and sports we're getting to a situation where it's an overload of information. EveryMatrix did 200,000 live events a month in March. That's ridiculous. We're getting to a point where it's going to be hard for players to go through that.
I think operators, on the level we're targeting now, tier ones, can read if you're coming through with a general sales pitch without taking into consideration their day-to-day struggles in the market
This is something we've been trying to do as an industry for a long time. There's been a lot we've been doing with different third parties or internally, but I'm hoping that 2025 and 2026 will bring a breakthrough in this. We're going to see technologies that are shaped around the end consumer. It's something that's missing. Brazil right now is something we're really interested in and we're following closely. But, we want to make sure we have the right plan to go in, not just to plant the flag and have whatever brand on our platform so we can say we're in Brazil.
As Global Commercial Director of EveryMatrix, what's next on your agenda?
Personally, it's about keeping this space with EveryMatrix and excelling. We have this average quality across the product portfolio and that we stack end-to-end. There's hardly a vertical within our industry that we're not covering at the moment. So, the point is to bring the main ones, the casino platform and sportsbook, to a level where we're best of the class in all fields, which is difficult to do. You have big companies out there that are focusing on a single aspect, like sports or casino or platform, so it's a really difficult task. But what I'm hoping is that we can actually spread the number of our B2C brands that people know and recognise, and that people are going to start shifting their mindset on having a provider across your whole turnkey. Operators sometimes are careful not to put all of their eggs in the same basket.
From my perspective, I hope we can bring on more tier one businesses. As always, our goal as a commercial unit is to not put the development team in a tight position where they cannot handle as many projects. So, it's always a fine balance between overdoing it and underdoing it. Right now, I think we still have some room to add new business. So, that's going to be our goal, not only in the markets where we're good, but in Latin America and Africa. We're gradually getting into new territories, but we're not rushing anything.
