Fixing the productivity problem

EGR: How does Fast Track remain committed to its core mission while navigating the rapid changes within the ever-changing igaming sector?

Simon Lidzén (SL): We had a clear vision of what we wanted to do from the very beginning and haven’t really changed our mission statement since the company began. Fast Track has been going for nine years, and we still live and breathe by it.

All of us co-founders had worked on the operator side of the industry and brought that with us to Fast Track. We were all about solving problems and finding better ways to do things. One of the biggest problems we saw was how to scale operations in a very competitive landscape. Players aren’t loyal; they play in multiple places, so operators have to figure out how to get a larger share of wallet. To do that, you have to win loyalty and make sure whoever plays with you wants to play with you over someone else. And that’s what’s been driving our customer relationship management (CRM) globally, industrially, agnostically, everywhere – everything has been about how we personalise offerings.

EGR: Can you tell me more about Fast Track’s Singularity Model?

SL: From a CRM perspective, the problem is how does an operator treat every single player as if they are the only customer they have? Some shops and restaurants can keep their regulars coming back, but how do you scale it when you have an operation with 100,000 or a million active players?

For a very long time, igaming has been doing CRM in a very basic format. The industry figured out certain types of incentives that get people excited and blasted out bonuses and free spins at certain times during the week. It worked, but then the industry started figuring out ways to become more relevant, particularly if the brand was strong. But the problem with traditional CRM tools is you have to create one campaign for every initiative and suddenly the normal Friday send out turned into 60, 70 or 100 different campaigns. That’s not scalable because ultimately, you’ll reach a point where the return on investment on the initiatives is less than the work involved to create them. So, Fast Track built the Singularity Model.

The Singularity Model flips the entire problem. It’s essentially attribution modelling. You build up a player profile using real-time data and AI, then based on the data in that profile you can matchmake with the promotions you’ve built. For example, instead of setting up ‘this is my campaign and this is the audience’, an operator will have ‘here are all my inactive players and here are all the potential campaigns I can send to an inactive player’. It fixes the productivity problem, so operators don’t have to.

The only thing operators must do in the middle is train an AI inside Fast Track. They decide what to prioritise and the Singularity Model figures out which promotion to send out using the algorithm the operator made. That then trickles all the way down, from when it’s sent, what channel is used, what the email looks like and how all of that behaves.

EGR: What challenges has Fast Track faced building this model?

SL: The biggest hurdle we had a year ago was that the Singularity Model didn’t have anyone to speak to. It was like a super capable brain in the middle that could tell you ‘give this bonus to this player,’ ‘give this value to this player’, but if there’s nothing to process that data, no promotional engine to make a bonus, nothing happens. We had to fix that.

From the beginning, the problem was really clear, and we had a solution that worked really well. All of a sudden, people were able to use Fast Track and create campaigns in no time, and scale that with real-time data. We now have more AI capabilities than you could ever imagine, and our operators are super excited about it.

EGR: In collaboration with the Rewards product, what key advancements do you believe this will bring to the igaming experience?

SL: Rewards has a promotional ecosystem where operators can scale with AI in every promotional element of their site. You have the front-end experience that can be made to look and feel like individual brands. You can build levelling system experience points which can become individually configured so every player has their own level and difficulty. Promotional coins and currencies can be built to create a dynamic whereby operators can reward players with something that is not necessarily monetary right away.

Challenges are another way to build different qualification criteria in the Singularity Model. Challenges such as ‘you need to log in X amount of days this week in order to get a bonus’, or ‘you need to play five different games to win multipliers of X’ can be used with a recommendation, so the system would say ‘you should wager exactly this much’ or ‘you need to log in three times a week because you played two last week’. There are huge capabilities and everything is completely dynamic. That’s the differentiator – it’s gamification.

EGR: Do you have operators using the Singularity Model right now and if so, how is it improving customer engagement?

SL:  We had operators using it from 1 December and they saw a massive uplift in numbers straight away. One of the features we have that is very easy to build is a Christmas calendar. Every day there were different missions and rewards. Christmas calendars are huge.

We’ve signed up a very large portion of our operators already on Rewards. Everyone’s very excited. They’re either signing up straight away or they are saying ‘we will sort out X, Y and Z, and then we will do it’. But everyone is saying they need it.

EGR: Because everyone’s got a unique personal play experience with different elements built in, can bonus abuse be overcome?

SL: Firstly, you need to understand how to abuse games – test them, understand how games can be used to store value, how bonuses can be abused, how terms can be abused, etc. And then you have to build data models and reverse engineer to check the intrinsics – how people are playing, stake optimisation, how they deposit, the behaviour around which games they’re playing. It might be just one out of 150 on 60 different abuse behaviours, but if you have the know-how, you will spot them because they tend to have very specific behaviour on what type of games they pick and what stakes they play because they want to optimise the value they’re getting out of the process.

It’s a very complicated space, but it’s a very important piece of the puzzle. We have operators that are very happy when their first action in the morning is to log into Greco and check to see if there’s been any bonus abuse-related activity. It’s very rewarding for an operator that has typically had to wait three to six months to find abusers. Over time, it’s going to be amazing because of how all these different pieces will come together.

EGR: Can you tell us more about your partnership with Greco and how it has enabled operators to effectively mitigate bonus abuse?

SL: One of the things we agreed very early on was that if Fast Track was going to rely on AI capabilities to enable bonusing to players, then we better be really good at identifying who should be bonused. We didn’t know a great deal about it but identified people who did – Ed [Dickerson] and Oz [Vondervelden], co-founders of Greco.

Greco’s done really good work with over 40 tier-one operators in tackling bonus abuse. They had a deep understanding of the topic that made it possible to build tech around it. We partnered up very early on and started developing a Gameplay Risk Engine, which analyses transactions in real time using very comprehensive AI modelling. It’s very quick. It only needs a couple of transactions on games to locate the bonus abusers because of their specific behaviour patterns depending on their type of abuse.