SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
Retaining elements of entertainment, while eliminating the stigma associated with the betting and gaming industries, is the crucial task facing stakeholders, cites Chandru Mullaparthi, Director of Bluehouse Technology.
However, in order to achieve this, a very clear display of just how seriously player protection is taken must be demonstrated throughout each level of every organisation.
This forms a central focus of Bluehouse Technology, which, in the first of a series breakdowns, elaborates on its inner workings, how it can help clients attain a new level of operation, regulatory integrations and much more.
Player Protection Hub: Thanks for talking to us today. Could you begin by guiding our readers through the Bluehouse Technology backstory and how you got to the position that you currently find yourselves?
Chandru Mullaparthi: I first encountered a computer aged 12 in my school and it was love at first sight. My Co-Founder (also my dear wife) and I studied Electronics and Communications at university but I was deeply in love with software, and let’s just say I dragged her along.
I’ve always wanted to start my own software development business, but for the first 20 years of my career I was having way too much fun developing software for telecoms to bother setting up a business.
I then realised I wasn’t happy with serving just one internal customer and I wanted to bring my expertise to a wider customer base. While we were figuring this out, I got a job at bet365 as they were facing technical challenges in an area of tech where I had deep expertise in.
I spent almost two happy years there but the long commute was taking its toll, which is when Sharmila and I decided to pursue my long held dream of starting a software business.
We initially didn’t have a full time team of developers but were pulling together teams of contractors to deliver the projects, in both the gaming and telecoms domains, we could get through our professional network.
In 2018 we got a long term commitment from one of our customers which gave us the confidence to set up a full time development team. We now have a large team of talented developers based in India and the Czech Republic.
PPH: You have a range of solutions available to help gaming companies reach the next level. However, when it comes to player protection, why can a company be assured it is in safe hands with Bluehouse Technology?
CM: We strongly believe that regulated markets are good for everyone in this ecosystem. Betting on sports and gaming should remain as something people do for fun rather than something they are addicted to or turn to in desperation.
While we are experienced across the entire tech stack for gaming companies, we have done extensive regulatory integration for one of our customers in the past few years, which has given us unique hands-on experience in dealing with the challenges with reporting to regulators in various jurisdictions.
Our core beliefs, our extensive background in telecoms which places very high demands on reliability and correctness, and our experience working with regulators around the world makes us uniquely suited to working in the player protection domain.
PPH: You have integrated systems with numerous regulators, particularly in Europe. How did this come about? And what key challenges do you counteract as part of these partnerships?
CM: This is an interesting story. Our primary expertise is mission critical, low latency and large scale systems. In the midst of the COVID pandemic, we gained a new customer who wanted us to help them with regulatory integration for a new jurisdiction they were planning to enter.
Although they had all the skills and resources required in-house, these were focused on expansion into new regulated markets.
Given our expertise in the betting domain and in building mission critical systems, we were able to hit the ground running and successfully deliver that project.
This went so well that our customer gave us responsibility for all their regulatory integration which we were more than happy to take.
PPH: Why is regulatory integration of such importance to the company?
CM: I hail from India, which has a lot of religious festivals. One of my childhood memories is playing rummy with my extended family during one of those festivals. We children were allowed to play with small amounts of real money under the supervision of adults and it was a lot of fun. The feeling of anticipation of a win is almost indescribable.
The adults had their own games which they played with slightly larger sums of money but it was still a fun affair and no one went bankrupt because of it. After emigrating to England I also see parallels to this where people enjoy betting on horse racing, buying a lottery ticket or placing a bet on their favourite teams.
I believe this element of fun needs to be preserved and promoted to remove the stigma associated with this industry, and the constant backlash we face from advocacy groups.
The only way to do this is to proactively demonstrate that we take player protection seriously, and we as an industry are not trying to exploit vulnerable people.
PPH: With all of the above in mind, what would you say are the primary targets/ambitions that drive yourselves forward?
CM: We set up Bluehouse Technology to create a software engineering centre of excellence. We strongly believe that software is a tool to enable businesses to achieve their objectives. Our aim is to be the best in the business of software development, so that we can enable others to succeed in their business.
