Following the recent announcement that Metric Gaming launched their first UK-facing sportsbook with Betzone, SBC News caught up with Director of Product, Matt Edwards, to discuss how the group’s platform and collaborative approach allowed for the smooth delivery, of a new product that can challenge the racing pecking-order in the UK.
SBC News: Your recent Betzone launch in the UK marks another successful implementation in a highly regulated market. What do you attribute this smooth deployment to, and how does it demonstrate the reliability of Metric’s platform?
Matt Edwards: A lot of work has gone into the architectural design of the Metric platform and the outcome is a system that carries very little technical debt and is extremely adaptable.
We’ve been running two sportsbooks in the Netherlands since June last year and despite there being significant regulatory and UX differences between the Dutch and the UK we didn’t need to do any significant refactoring to launch Betzone.
What additional work we did need to implement we were able to do quickly and safely because of our multi-tenant architecture. Code written for Betzone doesn’t need to be deployed to our other sportsbooks (and vice-versa) and that reduces the execution risk significantly.
If you’re running a legacy, monolithic platform you just can’t do that – your non-UK operators are going to have the code for greyhound racing for example in their site even though it’s not used. It’s a great advantage for us, and our customers to have that capability.
SBCN: The proprietary racing product you developed for Betzone was built significantly faster than industry standards. How did Metric enable this accelerated timeline whilst maintaining quality?
ME: Horse Racing is an interesting product to develop when your experience is mostly sports like football, basketball and tennis. SP bets, show pricing, forecast and tricast and handling non-runners & rule 4s are completely alien concepts to those sports.
Despite that, a very small team built the Metric racing product in about four months. To do this needs a few things – very close collaboration is one.
Despite half the team having no experience of racing – barely even watched a race – we created a high-trust, ‘no stupid questions’ environment that contributed significantly to the time to market and quality of the product.
That said, success is very much down to the quality of the platform we’re building on. Even as we threw concepts such as SP betting and rule 4 at the platform we didn’t need to fundamentally re-engineer the core. That’s credit to the architecture we have.
SBCN: You’ve described your approach with Betzone as creating ‘the same, but better’ experience for customers. Could you elaborate on how you balanced familiarity with improvement in the UI/UX design, and how this supports Betzone’s unique market positioning?
ME: Betzone had an existing site and an established customer base and we were all very keen to make the transition to Metric feel like an upgrade for players.
From the beginning we worked with the Betzone team on branding and look and feel to provide a familiar experience but also introduce some subtle tweaks to freshen up the site.
That said, we’re also able to quickly put together custom UI components so the core of the product feels the same. If you used Betzone before the migration you’d definitely feel at home but the UI is much neater and the overall look and feel more contemporary.
Since going live we have continued to release improvements to the product, delivering value quickly, such as forecast and tricast betting for racing and dogs, and since we’re unencumbered by a legacy UI we can develop a UX that’s exactly what both Betzone and Metric want and we think players will feel the benefit.
SBCN: While many competitors treat racing as merely a ‘hygiene product,’ your platform allows partners like Betzone to be more commercially aggressive with their racing offerings. How does Metric support this more ambitious approach?
ME: Racing is at an interesting spot at the moment. For operators it’s a very expensive product to run with data fees and levy on top of the other costs of doing business.
Lots of the big firms have really taken their foot off the gas when it comes to racing both in terms of promoting the product but also in terms of the concessions they are prepared to offer. BOG is becoming more scarce, boosts have largely replaced bonuses, extra places are being reduced.
We knew Betzone still see racing as a core part of their offering and as such we made the decision early that we would build best odds support, support for boosts and racing bonuses, support for extra places – but make them configurable at the tenant-level.
If we have a partner who wants to be aggressive in the marketplace the platform supports that. On the other hand, if a partner wants to be a bit more defensive they can do that by limiting those concessions and offering a more conservative pricing strategy.
Or even if a partner wanted to go all guns blazing with a generous bonusing-led approach – the multi-tenant architecture of our platform can easily support.
Being able to quickly and accurately profile players is what permits an aggressive strategy to remain commercially sustainable over time. The data and trading analytics capability we have gives Betzone confidence that they’re playing the right type of players and that the most efficiency is being extracted from their generosity and bonusing.
SBCN: Looking ahead, you’ve mentioned plans to ‘democratise racing information’ to attract new punters. What specific barriers do you see in the current racing betting experience, and how will your platform help partners like Betzone remove these obstacles?
ME: Speaking for myself now, I think one of the challenges racing has in attracting a new audience is that it’s a difficult product for the casual, entertainment bettor to dip into and feel they’re making an intelligent choice. If players want to put money down and feel it’s a really random choice they’ll play casino.
I don’t really follow football but I know that Liverpool are good but Leicester are not, Manchester City are better than Manchester United. Nottingham Forest are exceeding expectations. I’ve absorbed that by osmosis from the world in general and I could probably use that information to make a confident betting choice.
The same doesn’t exist for racing and if we want to attract new players I believe that the onus is on the industry to try and break down the knowledge barrier that exists, and make moves to unravel the unknowns for new players.
I’ll give you an example – now Frankie Dettori has retired I’m not confident the average person who isn’t engaged in racing could name a single jockey plying their trade today.
Given the huge significance of the jockey to the outcome of the race, wouldn’t it make sense to illustrate in some way the relative ability of, say, Oisin Murphy vs Oisin Orr?
You and I know that if we see Oisin Murphy booked on a cold Wednesday night in Newcastle that it means something but a new player doesn’t know that.
The ‘story’ behind the options, markets and pricing is already understood in football, whereas outside of the biggest races, it is not told in racing and that’s an opportunity that is waiting to be explored I think.
