Lean machine: Rootz CEO on how in-house tech and automation drive efficiencies

Sporting the tagline “automate the game” front and centre on its website, Rootz was formed in 2018 based on the premise of staff focusing on creative projects rather than “mind-numbing repetitive tasks”. With a foundation in technology, Rootz uses business intelligence, reporting tools and AI-driven gaming technology to streamline the player experience. 

With five online casino brands (Wildz, Caxino, live-streaming casino Spinz, pay and play casino Chipz and Wheelz featuring David Hasselhoff as the face of its brand) in its portfolio, Rootz has been operating in the regulated markets of Ontario since January 2023 and Germany from September 2022. It also operates in numerous dotcom markets via its Malta Gaming Authority (MGA) licence, focusing on jurisdictions that it feels are on the path to local licensing models.

Former CEO Lasse Rantala, now chair of the board at Rootz, first became involved with gaming from his passion for sports betting and playing basketball. In July 2023, he handed over the reins of the business to Sam Brown, who had been at the company for a year as chief commercial officer. Brown is well-versed in the sector with over 15 years of gaming experience working for operators such as Betsson, Hero Gaming and Betfair.

Speaking to EGR during a working holiday in Italy, Brown discusses his transition to the top job and his plans for new markets and verticals.    

EGR: How did the idea for Rootz first come about?

Sam Brown (SB): I wasn’t there at the beginning, but the Finnish founders essentially were the guys behind Rizk, which was a white-label brand on GiG’s platform. From operating a white label, what the founders saw was that there was an opportunity to do things much better with the use of good technology. They had a very good idea of what customers wanted, and how they wanted a casino to be presented and consumed. But they felt that the tools they were using were a bit antiquated and that there was an opportunity in the market to create much better customer experiences with the use of technology.

And so Rootz was founded, and the first brand went live in 2019. The motto of Rootz is ‘automate the game’. What we mean is that we try our best to use technology to solve problems or to do the work we feel would be somewhat menial for people. This instead allows humans to handle the creative and innovative parts of the business and creates great journeys and experiences while making the best use of technology to solve other problems.

They went about building a completely proprietary platform, completely proprietary CRM and customer lifecycle management engine. Then obviously built a brand, the first being Wildz, which came to market in 2019. There were a few teething troubles, as you would imagine with any business, but they very quickly found some niches in various markets and found a secret sauce they were able to leverage very well with the first brand.

One of the other key ingredients to the initial building of the technology was having a quick and easy ability to multi-brand because the founders saw that one of the quickest ways to grow your presence and your top-line revenue is to be able to leverage multiple brands across multiple markets. Shortly after Wildz became a success, Rootz started to roll out other brands. Fast forward to today, we now have five brands live, four of those we would consider global brands and one of them is a very specific pay and play brand operating in markets served by our MGA licence.    

EGR: How has your transition been from CCO to CEO in the last month?

SB: Intense. It’s obviously a massive advantage, having spent a year in the company and working very closely with Lasse. That’s ultimately how the decision came about. We need to mature as a business. We’re very much out of the startup phase in terms of timeline and scale. So, we decided it was the right time to make the move, create a board of directors, and it was natural that Lasse would assume the position of chair.

The great thing is that he’s still involved in the business on a daily basis, and we sit next to one another. Luckily, I’ve had the ideal handover in so much that Lasse has been there the whole time for me to go through and successfully hand off everything. But also to be there in the background when required.

So, it has been intense, but I would say not in a stressful way, in an exciting way. Lasse is one of the founders, he’s been there from the beginning. He’s very much an institution within the company, so they are quite big shoes to fill. We wanted to make sure, as a company, that we manage the change with absolute transparency and gave all of our staff adequate opportunity to discuss the changes with us and be able to address any concerns or comments.   

EGR: Rootz describes itself as a lean and mission-focused company. How big is the team now?

SB: We’re currently around the 200 mark, which I think for our revenue profile would definitely still be defined as lean. Of course, there are many areas where we can be really smart with our technology and try and keep the business very lean. There are other parts where we will always require humans for interactions as we acquire more local licences and there’s more emphasis on teams like AML and responsible gaming (RG), but also consistently increasing the number of support staff we have. On the operational side of the business, we are still growing and growing together with our revenue profile.

Of course, there are chatbot technologies that can automate tasks and there is software on the market for RG, document checks and so on. However, it’s an area that you simply have to take seriously. For us, we value having human eyes on those areas of the business as well as using modelling and the tools that we have. Having human oversight there gives us an extra degree of confidence and comfort that we’re extremely solid in those areas.

In the rest of the business, when it comes to CRM, commercial areas, marketing, games and so on, we remain lean. We don’t bring a huge number of staff onboard. The only thing that would probably trigger additional staff is new market entries where, of course, we always look for local expertise.

EGR: The tagline on your website refers to Rootz as “leading the way into a new era of igaming”. How is the company achieving this?

SB: From the beginning, all of what happens in the background is proprietary to Rootz and is a constantly evolving system. There are several facets to it. The most important, I would say, is what we call ‘Journeys’. Journeys is a decision tree-based customer lifecycle management tool, essentially.  Every time a transaction happens in our system, a customer logs in or loads a game, it triggers a reaction in the lifecycle management tool and then guides customers through in a highly personalised way.

These days, if you want to truly create amazing, innovative experiences, there’s no other way to do that than to do your very best to do them in a one-to-one way. The idea of having these decision tree-based journeys is that we can, more or less, live map everything that’s happening to a customer and build high-quality experiences for the customer based around what’s happening in the system.

For instance, being able to identify customers who experience an abnormally bad payout and rewarding them at sensible points to give them a better experience. Another good example is having built an in-house RG detection tool. So, with each transaction that happens, we’re checking to see whether we need to intervene in what’s happening with a customer’s experience because we feel that customer could be at risk.

The other benefit to collecting all that data is we’re able to build some more innovative tools. So, some of the promotional and experiential tools that we have in our system, we don’t see elsewhere in the industry. Of course, there are people out there doing similar things; there’s third-party software creating the same type of experiences and using machine learning in the same way. But we feel our advantage is we’re doing that very specifically towards our own brands. We’re not trying to cater for an entire industry or market. The tools are highly targeted, which is where we feel we have a big advantage and why we command the highest retention rates I’ve ever seen of any gaming company that I’ve been involved in historically.

EGR: What is Rootz’s USP?

SB: Everything is built in-house – everything is on our own proprietary technology. We use, of course, third-party game and payment suppliers. But the PAM, the back office, the front-end builds, the websites, the structures of those websites, all of that is done by us. It’s all part of our proprietary IP.

When it comes to our USPs, there are a couple of tools and marketing techniques where I would say we are in a fairly unique position. We don’t currently see others replicating those particular promotional tools and features in the system. But otherwise, what we focus on is having really clean and fast customer experiences. We try and limit friction in all of the key journeys on the website to ensure players will always be able to get their money in and out quickly, find the content they want quickly, as well as the site and games loading quickly.

For our ‘loyalty plus’ customers, we do weekly cashback and we’re extremely diligent about making sure those players receive their cashback at exactly the same time every week with complete consistency. With our partner services, we make sure everything moves promptly in terms of payments and settlement.

Our Spinz brand, which we launched just over a year ago, does have a USP as we’ve built our own streaming platform. We now have 24/7 live streams running from our office in Malta. We’ve just built three stream-specific studios, with proper lighting and sound isolation. Through our Spinz brand, we’re able to offer our internal streamers and sign up external streamers. Those guys stream through our platform instead of streaming through Twitch, Kick or those other platforms because we have historically been very successful with streaming.

But one of the issues with streaming and why there have been attempts to block it on several platforms in several areas is because of the age verification elements and ensuring you’re serving that content to the right audience. For us, we found it’s much safer to have that technology ourselves because the way we register customers and age verify them before showing them these streams gives us a significantly higher level of confidence that we are only ever distributing these types of entertainment to the right types of customers.

It’s something we will continue to develop over the coming years. It’s difficult as streaming is a liquidity business. You need lots of eyes to make it more and more engaging. It’s fair to say we’re not there yet. The brand performs very well but we’d like to see significantly more traffic across the streams themselves. As such, we will likely, in the not-too-distant future, enable streaming on our other casino brands from the same studios, which would, of course, exponentially increase the number of participants. 

EGR: How have you adapted in markets such as Germany where there are restrictions including slots stake limits, a 5.3% turnover tax on slots and a monthly deposit limit of €1,000?

SB: It’s a transition. When you go into that market, you have to realise that it’s not the same market the dotcom guys are experiencing. So, of course, you have to approach it in a very different way. Your VIPs don’t exist when you introduce such limits and you’re inherently looking at the larger volume, low-stakes, very casual gambling market when you’re following the German regulations. But we’re all aware that there’s a very abundant black market in Germany specifically and that’s where all the bigger players will find themselves.

There are challenges every time you enter a regulated market. Each one regulates slightly differently. I’d say the good thing in Germany is that we’ve had an open dialogue with the regulator throughout, and that’s been really useful. The regulations are what they are, you’re not going to change them.

Many people enter these markets and then spend a lot of time moaning about them and how the regulations are. That’s not really our approach. We enter the market because we see long-term potential, following the rules of the regulator. It’s more about us adapting and finding better ways to reach the right target audiences and providing them with personalised, really high-quality playing experiences, even at those lower stakes and with the slower timeframe.

One thing we found specifically in Germany is that getting game content live has been very challenging for us and  our competitors in the space. In other markets we have access to 3,500-5,000 games. In Germany, so far, we’ve struggled to get more than 400 through the process as it’s a bit arduous. But as I said, these are not uncommon teething troubles for a regulator.

EGR: How is Rootz performing in its other markets such as Ontario?

SB: Ontario, in all honesty, has been tougher than we thought. That’s mainly because there was a hard cut off in October last year and the licensing process took a little longer than we expected. Again, not uncommon, but what that meant is that we spent a significant number of months with zero presence in the market to comply with the new licence and rules of the market. So, unfortunately for us, we lost a lot of our active audience over the period where we were completely off air.

But since then, we’ve had six months now back in the market and we’ve got double-digit growth there. It’s a market we see massive potential in. Unfortunately, it’s been a bit of a slow start but we’re starting to see things moving in the right direction. We believe in the long-term future in Ontario.

It’s a slightly split market because you have us and some of the other European operators that go into that market in a more conservative fashion. Then you have the big North American guys who just go in, buy everything, all guns blazing. It’s highly competitive right now because everybody’s trying to land grab. We’re trying to stay out of those unnecessary scraps as we continue to grind away at what we’re good at and find our position in the market.

EGR: What are your plans for expansion into other markets?

SB: Our long-term strategy is to pursue locally regulated revenue growth. Most of where we are currently looking at is new locally regulated markets or, if not already locally regulated, those where we see a short- to medium-term high probability that they will become locally regulated. For example, some of the Latam markets currently operating dotcom but where we already see licensing models in progress, we will keep a close eye on those. Then we have a couple of ongoing applications in European, locally regulated markets, which we hope to come to fruition in the next six months or so. We keep our eyes open to enter a regulated market where our casino-focused business model and our brands will resonate.

EGR: Are you considering any new verticals or would you say your sole focus is still online casino?

SB: I’m sure the market is already aware but we’re currently in the process of vendor selection for sports betting, and we hope that by the end of this year we will have introduced a sports betting vertical across several of our brands.