Betsson interview: Built for the future

Betsson had its chequebook out on multiple occasions during 2016: the capture of horseracing operator RaceBets in a deal worth €40m in December followed the acquisition of TonyBet’s Lithuanian business a few months earlier. And the operator looks set to continue its aggressive M&A strategy across the next 12 months too.

With 21 B2C brands already under its belt, and with products continually being added to its casino and sports betting sites, the operator recently developed a new front-end platform, one which it says fits with its M&A and multi-brand strategy.

The One Betsson Group (OBG) platform acts as a component layer that sits between the company’s core Techsson platform and the front-ends of its multiple brands. It claims to offer the world’s largest mobile casino, with its flagship Betsson.com brand migrating first with other brands set to follow.

Speaking with EGR Technology, Betsson’s CTO Stefan Nordin provides an insight into the workings of its new OBG platform and explains why the automotive industry is a big influence on the firm’s direction of travel.

EGR Technology: What was the thinking behind developing your new front-end technology platform, OBG?

Stefan Nordin (SN): On the customer side, we wanted to raise the bar and build the best mobile casino experience in the industry, and I seriously think we have achieved that. There are several contributing factors to this. Firstly, we have been consistently adding games to our platform over the years. With over 800 games, we now have the largest mobile casino in the world, and we needed to build something from scratch to make it possible for our customers to use and have access to all of them. Secondly, being a multi-brand company with more than 20 brands, we realised we needed to build something in such a way that it could be used across all our brands.

Instead of building a site for Betsson.com and a different site for Betsafe, it’s far more efficient to build one, world-class website solution rather than several. From a technology perspective, we have been building this in a component based way – everything we build can be reused and scaled across tablet and desktop.

EGR Technology: From an M&A perspective, will it now improve the integration of new businesses into the new platform?

SN: With OBG, we have taken the whole platform concept through to the frontend, which will of course help a lot when we acquire new companies and sites. The amount of time it will take to get a new site on this platform is now a matter of weeks. From a technical perspective, we can add another 25 more sites without a problem. It supports the M&A and multibrand strategy that we have.

We acquired RaceBets in December, which will be interesting as it will be the first horseracing product to be integrated to the Techsson gaming platform. Eventually, that will be available on all our sites through OBG. We have taken scalability from the provider level, through the platform and up to the site. Looking around, we haven’t found another platform that is capable of adding the amount of different providers that we can.

Stefan Nordin, Betsson

EGR Technology: What improvements have you made to your personalisation and recommendation features on the mobile casino as a result of OBG?

SN: It’s now all centred on big data. What this means is that we have all the intelligence and knowledge about our customers since registration and it gives us huge insight into our customers’ interests. From a customer perspective, those responsible at Betsson or Betsafe will be able to choose which features they want to present on a given day to the customer. We can target and program what the customer can see thanks to the use of big data.

EGR Technology: Is there a particular recommendation engine that has influenced Betsson’s own version?

SN: I think it is pretty similar to Netflix or YouTube. For instance, when I head to YouTube to watch an old Ronnie O’Sullivan match, recommendations are made based on what I’ve just watched. And I like that because I want to see more of him. We have taken inspiration from other innovative industries, so I would say that’s pretty similar to our thinking.

EGR Technology: Tell us more about the investment Betsson has made into technology in recent times, how does this help the company stand out in a competitive market?

SN: We believe in owning our own technology, and to have that you need to invest in good people. Even though we invest in things such as the Amazon cloud and big data, most of our money is invested in people.

In February, we will be releasing sportsbook onto OBG. It’s been completely rewritten and we will be using push technology. These innovations cost money but they tend to be short-lived because of the pace of the industry. The long-term investment is about employing brilliant people in the best locations; without those people, there’s no point investing in new products or technology.

EGR Technology: Which other industries inspire you from a technology point of view?

SN: When creating technologies to support our business, the car industry has been surprisingly influential. If you think about Volkswagen Group, the way they develop the bottom chassis, the framework and the engine – they define those elements to be scalable and use the development to support Volkswagen, Audi and other cars it manufactures. It may sound strange to be influenced by an industry that is over 150 years old, but you can always learn from the people who have been around for a long time.

We have been particularly inspired by the Erlang programming language developed by Ericsson in the telecoms industry. From a tech perspective, we’re always looking for a system that helps us with the large volume of transactions we receive per second, and how we can learn from programmes such as Erlang or applications like WhatsApp who use this sort of technology. The egaming industry is maturing a lot, but it’s also easy to make mistakes.

EGR Technology: Why did Betsson choose London as the location for its new data hub earlier this year?

SN: Around a year and a half ago we found that when it came to big data and data science, there weren’t many people available in Malta with this particular skillset or even people willing to move to the island at that time. We decided to start up a small hub in London focusing on those disciplines, but it’s also home to a few marketing people. The idea was to try and make them work together with the data insight and how to market products better, and it’s been pretty useful so far.

EGR Technology: When recruiting talent, do you look for people with egaming experience, or prefer those from outside the industry who can offer something different?

SN: It’s a mixture of both. We need new blood and ideas, and particularly in Sweden where we hire people from the open source industry; they have experience working in other sectors such as banking and can bring new ideas. However, I still feel it’s important they understand our product and you need a mixture of people to have that balance.

EGR Technology: How is Betsson looking to bridge the tech skills gap? How do you make sure Betsson is an attractive place for a techie to work?

SN: Having a development background, I would never want to work for a boring company. I want to work for a company that experiments with new and exciting technologies because that is more important for my future as well. We are always looking to use new technologies. For example, we took the decision earlier this year to start using Angular Javascript 2.0 – this was six months before it was finally released – but the developers have been extremely engaged and happy working with the new technology.

EGR Technology: In what areas do you think egaming can improve on when dealing with technology? Is the industry lagging behind other ecommerce industries in embracing new technologies?

SN: I would say the industry has been lagging behind issues surrounding compliance and regulatory requirements, such as adopting cloud servers in multiple locations, but those things have been sorted now and I feel the industry is catching up in this area.

EGR Technology: Has Betsson experimented at all with new technologies such as virtual reality or wearable technology? Do you think these experiences will ever take off in the egaming industry?

SN: We’ve recently run a hackathon and have been experimenting internally with virtual reality, with one of our team members working on a VR app. I would love to play games such as Battlefield using VR glasses, but I’m not 100% convinced today that the mass market in egaming is ready yet. I don’t see myself sitting on the Tube with those big, ugly glasses playing casino. We are keeping an eye on it for future use.

EGR Technology: With the likes of Amazon and Google investing heavily in voice technology, do you think it will have an impact on egaming?

SN: From a mobile perspective, I have tried to think how this would work for the customer, and I’m not really sure they would want to tell their phone what to bet. I still think the touchscreen is good enough and will continue to be the main source. Maybe voice and virtual reality might work in the future. If you look at smart home technology, such as Amazon’s Echo, you could envisage people using voice technology in the home environment, whilst watching a match for instance.

EGR Technology: What is Betsson’s tech roadmap for 2017? How will you improve your technical capabilities?

SN: We will be focusing largely on the adoption of OBG across all our sites and channels, that’s the main objective. In terms of the back-end, we are looking to further improve sportsbook as well as integrate horseracing and I think we are ready to compete with the biggest firms. Lastly, we will be looking to utilise the knowledge we get from big data to further improve our personalisation tools.