Who is SmartSoft and where are you in the market right now?
We have a few product verticals. But the main one, which we started in 2015, is our gaming studio. One of our main drivers in the gaming studio is non-traditional games and instant games – typical games you would play on your mobile after downloading from the app store kind of thing, except you can gamble. A few years ago, this category was non-existent in the casinos; perhaps there were a few games like that, but they didn’t make any money at all.
Right now, it has become part of the mainstream and all of the big operators have it as a separate category in their product offering. This is one of our main drivers, but at the same time we do live, slots and virtual casino games. At the moment we’re doing much more in slots, we hired a product development team and expanded it recently; beforehand our team was more CIS orientated but now we’re making a new system with new and innovative mechanics, and very good visual graphics.
The third one I mentioned is live virtual casino; our live casino software offering is something we have been offering to Entain and CrystalBet for quite a while – and now we plan to launch worldwide. Basically, we’ll have a small live studio and supply that to our customers; that’s the gaming side. At the same time, because of our years of experience, we have developed a new platform and sportsbook, which is another vertical for us. It is going to be state-of-the-art, completely new technology, very flexible, customisable, with a lot of features for the customers.
What markets are you looking to expand into first with the new platform?
We are thinking about expanding into unregulated markets as a priority, places like Brazil and the LatAm region – after that, we’ll see. We have big plans; but first we want to see and try how things go, then we’ll think of the next steps.
Are places like the US just a dream, or is that something you’re looking at as a reality for the near future?
Every iGaming company has American dreams. I think it is in the plan and in the pipeline. Right now, we’re also getting licensed in Ontario and after next year we’ll work on getting licences in the US. So it is in next year’s plans. It is not an easy market regulation-wise, so we haveto figure out the best options for us there.
What other countries in the LatAm market are you targeting?
We’re thinking of Chile, Mexico and Peru as our main focus. We have the platform ready and will announce those plans at the SiGMA exhibition in Malta; after that we’re ready to onboard clients and go live with them. It’s going to be a turnkey solution; we’re going to offer software, support and a lot of other services – only marketing and acquisition will be on the client side.
Are you still looking to expand in European markets?
We’re working on that now. We have a licence in Romania, Malta, Italy, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, the Netherlands, Croatia – I don’t want to miss any of the jurisdictions but we are in many of them. Currently, we’re in the licensing process in Greece.
We’re looking to expand in Portugal as well, once they open the doors for this kind of betting. We’re working on the UK, too; it is a huge market and we’ll see how that works out.
With so many competitors in the field, what is your USP?
Well, let us talk about non-traditional games. The main driver in these types of games are crash games, they are really popular and many providers are making them. In crash games, the biggest factor for success is the technical capability. If it’s a multiplayer game there are a lot of players, so you should handle a lot of traffic without the game lagging and without any glitches, bugs or problems. We have huge experience in platforms and sportsbook, that’s why we are strong on the technical side.
Our games are performing very well, so we can manage huge traffic. We are currently doing that in Brazil where we have 3/5,000 concurrent players with one operator, and we’re able to handle that without a problem. Whereas some others can only handle up to 1,000 max.
