You have said before that iGP’s strategy is highly user centric. How do you approach tailoring your games to user habits in real-time scenarios?
A problem the industry currently has when looking into user habits is that the information produced is actually quite generic and not as personalised as many think. When you’re harvesting information on things like demographics, gender and data flows, you can only personalise to a certain extent.
What we want to do is create is a Netflix-style lobby where we will not only consider the individual player data, but also compare with data from other similar players to showcase what you might like. Then, as you go along, the recommendations will be updated. This will be the natural progression of how player data is utilised and should ultimately make the playing experience even better.We are in the process of developing an AI-powered game recommendation engine, which will allow us to learn more about player habits and improve all our stats sources on each player.
Last year, we laid the groundwork for this, ensuring our data was organised and rich enough to be useful to our partners; a step many forget to take.
Has iGP begun to integrate any predictive analytics tools?
This is something that’s been part of our focus recently. At the end of last year, we completed a project where we set up our in-house data warehouse. We centralised all the data into one location. We then put this into action at the start of this year and we have started building the predictive algorithms that will make the data useful. This will allow us to learn even more about important player information, such as their VIP potential, as well as fraud and risk checks. Crucially, this is a key step towards bringing onboard automated and AI-powered solutions.
"Predictive analysis is a core step towards greater personalisation”
We talk a lot about personalisation in iGaming right now. How do you feel it is changing the industry?
This is an interesting one, because I think we have some way to go in this area as an industry. From what I’ve seen, there are companies which have tried proof of concept, but you don’t see anything really moving things along. When you compare gaming with ecommerce and the online streaming giants, we are still lagging behind when it comes to learning more about the player beyond basic data, and this ties in with what I mentioned about our game recommendation engine. I wouldn’t say there is too much focus on personalisation per se, but we need to focus on doing it in a more refined way with better long-term results than we’re currently doing.
"I don’t feel we’ve seen anything to really change the industry yet when it comes to personalisation"
With regard to player acquisition and retention, how have new technologies such as AI changed the landscape for iGP?
Automation and predictive modelling have been in the industry for a couple of years now, and it’s something we’re embracing more and more. We already have third-party partners in this area, but from late this year or in early 2025, we will focus on improving our existing automation and how we can use AI to aid the data-heavy processes that AI can
feed off. We select our partners based on their AI capabilities that can support us. While we already have processes in place, the plan is to use AI to enhance those automations and processes. We may have used AI already to make an immediate impact, but the focus is now on working out how to deploy it for our processes and automation.
