SBC News SBC-QT: What industry innovations are we looking for?

SBC-QT: What industry innovations are we looking for?

This year’s Betting on Football is fast approaching, with only five days to go before the event kicks off at Stamford Bridge from 19-22 March. We have been catching up with our event sponsors to discuss a range of topics such as industry innovations and the relationship between betting and football.

In the run up to #bofcon as part of SBC’s Question Time, we turned our attention to all things innovation. We asked our sponsors what innovative ideas and developments they believe will capture the industry’s attention in 2019.

Peter Woodfine (Business Development Director, Vermantia): It’s always a dangerous thing to look into the crystal ball and try to second guess the future! But I think we will continue with the trend of operators and their suppliers making life simpler, more convenient, and increasingly tailored to their customers.

Modern consumers want a seamless user experience that is personalised to them. This has been happening in online for a while now, but we are seeing it more and more in retail too.

Our SSBTs are cashless and convenient and we are providing data and picture content to our partners customised to the needs of the local audience. A lot of that is in football which, in-shop, is often far more popular on SSBTs than over the counter.

Steven Rogers (Chief Commercial Officer of Virtual Sports, Inspired Entertainment): At Betting on Football 2018 I caught an interesting seminar on the emergence of Esports and their increasing popularity in the sports betting community. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this growth continue in 2019 given how rapidly Esports is growing with significant boosts in revenue from media advertising, sponsorship and development partnerships and merchandise sales.

I’ve seen professional sports teams and athletes investing in Esports teams which is very exciting indeed!

Another big emerging innovation, not just in sports betting, but virtual sports, esports, casino etc.. is the continuing emergence of Virtual Reality (VR). The player experience has been a massive focus point in the gambling industry of late and VR can clearly take this to the next level.

As a Virtual Sports provider, we are excited to explore the potential of VR to create a fully immersive virtual sports experience for players, placing them on the football pitch or in a race car or riding the winning horse in the Grand National. We are well placed to embrace this technology and believe it will become more prevalent in 2019 and beyond.

Motti Colman (Director of New Business, Optimove): I believe that front end personalization needs to have a huge impact on football betting.  The variety of betting options are huge and the customer is still being presented with far too much choice when they login in to most sites.  

Operators need to have a much more focused, one to one approach to the individual player and use all available data to provide the customer with the most relevant betting options.

I always enjoy hearing about the progress that Bookee are making as I think they have built the most innovative product on the market in regards to a personalized sports betting experience.

Martin Wachter (CEO, Golden Race): Customers and operators increasingly require newer, faster, and more intuitive experiences. In this sense, HTML5 is one of the innovations which is helping to shape the future of virtual sports development; that is why we focused on building our games with this new technology.

HTML5 ensures a faster creation and improvement of virtual sports products, enabling more iterations and better results. These games run smoothly on various devices and operating systems, satisfying the requirements of reliability, scalability and security.

Intuitive back offices that allow fast integrations without needing a big structure, better graphics, and safe payment solutions are also key developments in which we are constantly investing, driving the growth of the football betting industry.

This year’s Betting on Football will host a track entitled Betting on Innovation, which will look at developments across the sports betting industry.

#bofcon will be attended by over 2000 c-level and senior executive delegates from across the industry – Find out more here. 

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