OddsMatrix: Road To Regulation: What Brazilian players really want from operators – Part 3

Tor Skeie, CEO at OddsMatrix, shares insights with SBC News revealing how to adopt a winning strategy for the regulated Brazil market when it opens on January 1. In the third part of an ongoing series, Skeie addresses the types of features that resonate with Brazilian players most in their betting and gaming experiences.

Part 3: Features

As Brazil moves ever close to opening a regulated market in January 2025, at OddsMatrix we have conducted a deep dive into the key player requirements that operators will need to focus on and offer.

In partnership with ENV Media, we’ve carried out an extensive player behaviour survey of more than 1,800 sports bettors across Brazil. 

This extensive survey will be presented across five themes: Entertainment, Localisation, Features, Coverage and Brand.

In our third analysis we explore ‘Features’ and lift the lid on which contemporary sportsbook products and trends resonate with a Brazilian audience open to innovation and ready for regulation.

Features: key battleground for betting brands in Brazil

The online sports betting experience has been transformed in the last 20 years via a host of new product and feature innovations that have rolled off operators’ roadmaps and onto the home pages of multiple sportsbooks.

The introduction of live betting in the 2000’s has been followed by the likes of Cash Out, Odds Boost and Bet Builder in the last five to 10 years.

Many of these features have gone from novel products to essential cornerstones of sportsbooks and our survey data points to them being powerful pawns for operators in the battle for attention, retention and spend in newly regulated Brazil.

With 92% of recipients committed to betting with online channels and 64% not aligned with one brand, the opportunity for digital first operators to differentiate via the strength of these features is a real one.

Building on opportunity

The ability to place multiple selections within one sportsbook event has been a key driver of global betting behaviour in the last five years. Labelled as Bet Builder in Europe or Same Game Parlays in North America, certain operators have attributed more than 50% of their total bets to this product.

This appetite for Bet Builder also extends to Brazil with 83% of respondents saying they have placed bets within this product and 31% singling it out as one of their most used sportsbook features.

One of the major strengths of Bet Builder is its ‘stake low, win high’ make-up and with 44% of bettors stating they stake between R$5 and R$20 on combo bets this positions Bet Builder as an attractive bet type for a high number of players.

But what is clear from our Bet Builder findings is that there remains a gap between product performance and player expectations in Brazil. Forty three percent of our survey participants said they were neutral or dissatisfied with the Bet Builder feature on their current betting platform, so there is a clear opportunity for operators to pick up market share by offering players a high-performing, same game multiple product.

Cash constant

Like Bet Builder, Cash Out has evolved into an integral part of a modern-day sportsbook and this exciting product is well established in Brazil. The ability to exit from a live, open bet is viewed as an essential part of the player experience there. Among our 1800+ recipients, 95% said they had used a cash out product with 45% stating they frequently or always used the product. Half of respondents rated it as one of their most used features.

This indicates that operators need to offer top-of the-market iterations of sportsbook features like Cash Out, Bet Builder and beyond to enhance user satisfaction and engagement. Providing first-class product experiences will ensure a high level of satisfaction and lead to higher retention rates.

Innovation in need of improvement

Cash Out was at the forefront of an innovation wave within the sportsbook industry a decade ago, but has the pace slowed up in new product development? Brazilian players say ‘sim’. When asked to rank innovation within the product offerings of their current betting platform 37% offered an average, poor or very poor rating. This dissatisfaction with current ‘innovation’ runs alongside a strong desire for increased development within the sportsbook product. When asked if innovative features and services would make them try a new betting site, 71% claimed it would be likely or very likely.

Therefore, the message is clear, operators must embrace forward-thinking product development to capture and retain players. Offering a suite of modern, core sportsbook features like pre-live and live Bet Builder, multi-layered Cash Out, Early Payout and Odds Boost will be vital to succeed in the market.

OddsMatrix – how we bridge the features gap: 

Our research indicates that Brazilian bettors have a clear appetite for contemporary sportsbook features and view innovation as a key requirement.

The OddsMatrix platform meets these player needs with a deep, suite of sportsbook features to stimulate the tens of thousands of players who engage with our platform. Here are just a few examples. 

• OddsMatrix offers an 11 sport pre-live and live Bet Builder covering diverse events from football, basketball, American Football and table tennis.
• We offer a multi-layered flexible cash out product that includes full, partial and auto player options
• Introduced in 2024, our multi-sport Early Payout feature actions a payout before the event settles after a certain trigger is reached (e.g.) if a football team go 2-0 up, if a male tennis player goes two sets up etc
• The OddsMatrix Odds Boost enables operators to issue players with tokens to boost the existing odds of their selection
• Stake Back hands operators the tools to return a portion of players’ losing stakes on single and multiple bets