SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
Product differentiation and fan engagement are staples of today’s digital world, and such concepts must be embraced to ensure that organisations don’t get lost in the crowd, believes Jason Angelides, Founder and President of Epoxy.ai.
In a wide ranging conversation on the show floor of the recent SBC Summit Latinoamérica, Angelides addresses the cost savings to be felt by correctly utilising AI and data, how building a better product can be significantly elevated through personalisation and why the company’s wager and wager solution can simplify and enhance an users experience.
SBC News: Thanks so much for joining us Jason, Could you begin by explaining a little bit about the company and the core focus of Epoxy.AI?
Jason Angelides: Of course. You can think of us as a company that really helps make the gaming experience better for end users. If you think of companies like Netflix, Spotify and even Amazon, and what they’ve done to personalise the end user experience, that’s largely the technology and philosophy we’re bringing to the gaming space.
SBCN: We’ll cast our focus back a little bit here and the completion of your investment round. Could you just talk us through what that means for the company, as well as how it has and will enable you to continue to grow on your current path?
JA: Start-ups are fundamentally reliant on being capitalised and we were able to secure a nice round of funding to help us continue to build out our technology and our patent portfolio and expand into other markets. That’s why we’re down here in Miami at the SBC Summit Latinoamérica, and we were recently in Barcelona.
Really for us, it’s about growing the team, tech and intellectual property to help better serve our customers.
SBCN: From a data perspective, it’s safe to say you’ve had some tangible success. Could you talk us through how you keep the momentum going from that perspective?
JA: Our business is all about data and it really depends on what businesses want to do. They want to reduce their operating costs and they want to increase their revenue, and so we hit both sides of that.
AI is really hard to do. It’s not a simple thing, and I don’t think that the audience that’s reading this would disagree with that. While it’s on a lot of roadmaps, it’s something that’s hard to get to. So we come in and help provide technologies that allow you to accelerate your roadmaps in a much, much more efficient way. So there’s cost savings there.
The second piece of it is what you get out of it. When you understand your customer better, you can market to them better, you can buy advertising at a less expensive price, and then if you serve them the right content in their client application and put the right things in front of them, you can drive significant increases in revenue.
So I’ll give you some specific data points that we’ve gotten from recent customers, but I won’t quote who they are. For example, we’ve implemented personalisation similar to Netflix that delivers rows of bets that are tailored specific to the end user. One’s trending for you, the other is historical based on what you bet on.
The other one is based on popularity, and this simplifies the process of having to find what you’re interested in.
In the cases where we put these things in place, we’ve seen anywhere from a three to six percent lift in GGR. That’s meaningful. That’s very meaningful. It’s not lost on anybody how ultra competitive the space is.
SBCN: It can be argued that LatAm has been something of a buzzword for quite a number of years, with personalisation another such example and a topic that is a huge talking point. Could you just talk us through how they marry up? And touch upon if the space is mature enough for such a unity?
JA: The space itself is like any other gaming space from the perspective of operators’ need for product differentiation at the end of the day. They need to understand their customers better and need to serve them with better end user experiences.
Product differentiation and fan engagement are very top of mind and we see this market is really no different. In fact, in many cases, we actually think this offers this market, given the fact that it is still emerging, an opportunity to really create differentiation much quicker than some of the more established markets.
SBCN: Sticking with these themes, how can personalisation affect an operator’s ability to create a better experience. Ultimately, could this be the key between a potential success and failure?
JA: I’d love to say that personalisation is such a differentiator, that if you don’t have it, you’re going to go out of business, but I don’t think that’s the case. I just look at leader companies in the space, leader companies in other spaces, if you kind of look at what’s happened in commerce, if you’ve looked at what happened in music and in video, the leader organisations in those spaces have benefited significantly by reducing costs and increasing revenues.
Is it the only key? No, but I think at the end of the day, building better products that are more tailored to the end user, and specific to what they’re interested in, and that understand them, is really a staple now in the digital world.
SBCN: From that entertainment perspective and from a player perspective, how can personalisation heighten an experience from simply being something that resembled a purely transactional encounter?
JA: I think it’s all about creating a better experience and I’ll reference an example of how personalisation and advanced technology can really create some differentiation.
One of the things that we have intellectual property around is essentially a watch and wager scenario. Not only can we offer bets that you’re most interested in, as well as simplifying the experience and making it quicker and easier, we actually have technology that, with a customer’s approval, will allow them to understand what they’re watching in their living room.
Based on that, for example, I’m from Philadelphia, if I open my device in my living room and I’ve given permission to the device to listen, which many, many people do, then I can actually have bets specific to what I’m watching.
If I’m watching the Philadelphia Eagles, I can receive bets regarding the franchise or a specific play. If I switched over to the Philadelphia 76ers basketball game, I could now see bets associated with that, or a parlay between the Eagles and the Sixers.
So, It’s not only about just the data side, It’s really about using the data to create a better entertainment experience and bringing the user closer to what’s actually happening.
SBCN: You recently said that casinos are a dramatically underserved market from personalisation, could you just elaborate on that? And maybe talk about how this can potentially be corrected?
JA: I think it’s pretty simple to understand, and I don’t want to keep going back to things like Netflix and so on, but there are thousands of games, and in many cases it’s very hard to scroll through and find things you’re looking for.
With the right sort of behavioural analysis, metadata and analysis on the back end, we can provide the user with a much more tailored experience that also gives the gaming operator the capability to put the right forms of content in front of the end use and actually drive key metrics, whether it’s GGR, retention, churn.
Imagine knowing enough about your customer to figure out when they’re actually going to get tired of an application and give them something else. It’s all about understanding user behaviour and tailoring the end user experience. Online casinos right now are still largely one to many, and we believe it should be one to one.
SBCN: To conclude, as we surge towards the end of the year, what is in store for Epoxy.AI though 2024 and beyond?
JA: For us, it’s really about continuing to prove the value position, expanding our relationships, and breaking into some of these emerging markets.
We believe that watch and wager is something that’s going to hit pretty hard next year. You’re kind of seeing this happen right now in the space already, with media companies trying to figure out what they can offer beyond advertising. We think that that’s going to be something really exciting for the end of the year, and early next year as well.
