Platform for success: how Kindred Group’s in-house sportsbook is taking shape

It is just over two years since Kindred Group revealed that the business was developing its proprietary Kindred Racing Platform into a full in-house sports betting proposition. The acquisition of Relax Gaming in 2021 demonstrated the Stockholm-listed operator’s desire to have greater end-to-end control over its products and, so, the announcement of the Kindred Sportsbook Platform in February 2022 was the next logical step in the journey to self-sufficiency.  

But as director of sportsbook Andreas Reimblad and group head of trading Ben Colley explain, the build began before the official announcement, with personnel assigned to the task having to sign NDAs and clandestinely work on what bosses already knew would be an extremely ambitious project. Indeed, this would be a far larger and more complicated, as well as costlier, build than the Kindred Racing Platform for Unibet’s parent company. Despite the pressure of all eyes within Kindred – and plenty of attention externally too – being trained on the Kindred Sportsbook Platform over the past two years, Reimblad and Colley are adamant that bringing sports betting in-house at Kindred was the right decision.  

EGR: Going back to the beginning, what was the thinking behind the decision to build the Kindred Sportsbook Platform (KSP) and eventually migrate from your main supplier, Kambi?

Andreas Reimblad (AR): There are many different reasons and rationales. If you look at the three main pillars, it about control of the product and the whole experience. A big part of the Kindred strategy over the last couple of years has been to move more development in-house on the product side, and the Relax [Gaming] acquisition was part of that strategy.

I don’t think it has gone unnoticed by anyone regarding the situation of being fully dependent on a supplier. We saw examples over the last couple of years where suppliers were kind of abandoning their focus on the B2B side and leaving a lot of operators in the unknown and hanging. For us, it was a focus on ensuring we have supplier security. And the third one is around the financials, which [CEO] Nils [Andén] mentioned in the Q4 results [on 7 February]. The market has changed tremendously over the last couple of years, and we see financial upside of taking this in-house.

EGR: The Kindred Racing Platform (KRP) transformed your horseracing offering, underlined by the group scooping horseracing operator of the year at the EGR Operator Awards two years on the trot in 2021 and 2022. How did KRP lay the groundwork for the development of KSP?

Ben Colley (BC): The Kindred Racing Platform continues to be highly successful in our key racing markets, which are the most competitive in the world: the UK and Australia. When we were going to the board saying, ‘We know we can do this [KSP] and execute on this opportunity’, we could point to the Kindred Racing Platform and say, ‘Look at what we have already done’. We’d proven that a reliance on a turnkey supplier such as Kambi really wasn’t a given anymore for Kindred’s future, so we had a solid foundation to make our case.

Very much the product vision with the Kindred Racing Platform was 24/7 data streaming around everything, so when the customer comes in, they have the Racing Post in front of them, the results, all the newspaper tips and they can watch every race. What we ended up with was by far the most comprehensive racing platform out there. It was almost like ‘casinofying’ the product. There is always something for the customer and they can watch it and read about it so that they aren’t ill-informed. It’s the same core engineering team that worked on the Kindred Racing Platform that are leading the delivery pipeline of the Kindred Sportsbook Platform.

EGR: What have been some of the challenges with a project of this magnitude?

BC: When we got the green light for this project, we approached it with humility. We are acutely aware of those that have tried and failed before us – professional outfits with good teams beneath them. So, we were under no illusion as to the size of the task. Horseracing is one thing, but the reality is there is in-play [with sports betting] and racing has very limited derivative markets, so it’s a complete gear change to move into mainstream sports.

Also, in the very early days, we had to consider our supplier relationship and, so, we didn’t tell anyone we were doing it; we kept it under lock and key internally as to the strategic intention. That’s all well and good when you got a handful of people on internal NDAs, but when you are then trying to recruit at an aggressive pace across all sorts of areas that are notoriously difficult to hire the right people for, and you can’t tell them the full story, you can see how that was immediately a risk.

Outside of that, we have approached the whole project in a hyper-agile way. I know everybody says that, but I think we can say, hand on heart, we have been very quick to take significant and pivotal decisions. It was also a high-cost, high-strategy project for us and, so, there was a lot of eyeballs on it. It was important to calm people down and explain that we were going to encounter problems and bumps in the road. That was not because of what we we’re doing, it’s because it was like any other project that is vulnerable to headaches. That’s not going to change no matter what you are trying to deliver.

EGR: What are you ultimately trying to achieve with KSP as a product?

BC: What we said all along was we weren’t going to build something like a 25-year-old monolithic [tech] stack. A core underlying part of our vision is new technological advances in data science and quant analysis, so our own price modelling and algorithmic, automated decision making. We’ve got a large skillset in-house working on it, but the reality is it does represent a learning curve for us all.

AR: The market has changed over the last couple of years. I’m not going to say it’s easier to build something now but at least it’s another dimension with all kinds of niche suppliers specialising in different sports or product features that can accelerate your development to help you focus on what really matters. We saw with the racing [platform] the importance of being very local. What we offer [with sports] in France is different to Sweden, for example. Having a local approach is significantly important to us, so we are developing a product that suits every Unibet market, as well as 32Red and potentially other brands in the future.

EGR: One aspect of KSP is the ability to offer targeted local pricing. Why is this important?

BC: At the moment, we don’t have the opportunity to support local commercial initiatives like top price X or top price Y in the way we want. Given our sponsorship footprint and marketing initiatives locally, that can become a challenge. The other side of that is when you are top price for X, such as Ajax in the Netherlands, you don’t want to be offering these odds with a very small overround in the UK where there is potentially less interest in the match. So, configuration allows you to be different prices for different markets, fundamentally around the same 100% book. We can essentially adjust [odds] locally but trade it within a global liability framework.

With the KSP we have a significant tool kit for the commercial teams to use various types of boosts, moneybacks, trigger-type rewards and things. There are restrictions in certain markets – a good example being Sweden [where it’s a one-time bonus] – but we are empowering our marketing teams because we have a greater capability and because, fundamentally, we are one step closer to the customer. We can make changes very quickly to support local initiatives, and that isn’t available with the status quo.

AR: You can compare it to the fact we have so many regulatory rules. In France, for example, we have to deliver 15% margin. So, that capability is something we will have in KSP and it gives us the opportunity to be very local. Following on from what Ben said about sponsorship, we have a significant portfolio; we are one of the main sponsors of some [Dutch] Eredivisie clubs and we have the sponsorships of the [top two football leagues] Allsvenskan and Superettan in Sweden. We think we can utilise this to create unique bet propositions or whatever it might be to fit the narrative of Kindred’s brands and markets. Internally at Kindred, there is so much support for KSP. You have [teams in] markets wanting us to roll it out as quickly as possible and they share the view that differentiation is key.  

EGR: The online sports betting industry has long been described as commoditised and filled with ‘me-too’ products. What’s been your approach to the UX of KSP when it comes to the differentiation you just mentioned?

AR: This was something we discussed at length in the beginning. We have some customers coming from one product and we have customers coming from another product, so how do we marry that up in a very smooth transition? Kindred was one of the first [operators] demanding APIs from our supplier to be able to differentiate itself on the front-end. We have built part of our front-end on Kambi’s APIs, and we have a unique presentation in France, for example. We are trying to bring the best of what we have in France into this product. So, it’s about the customer getting a smooth first interaction with KSP. Then we are looking at where we will be in one year, two years, three years and how consumers are using apps. It’s so important to us as the majority of our revenue is from mobile, and we will be upping the sportsbook experience in the future.

EGR: You could argue, if it ain’t broke then don’t fix it. How conscious are you of the danger of veering too far off-piste with the UX?

AR: It’s a good question. We want to bring a lot of the identity we have today [to KSP]. It’s what we know the Unibet customer loves. That’s the reason they are playing with us today. But I don’t think we should do a complete switch with a completely new design and a completely new way of navigation. We want to keep the fundamental pieces in the product, but we see an opportunity to tailor it for a customer who is younger, and how they like to consume the product may be different to our current customers. Of course, we are following trends and see opportunities, like player-related bet builders where it’s a chance for us to build another experience for our customers in the future.

EGR: Have you drawn inspiration from other B2C sectors with this new product?

BC: There is definitely an opportunity to borrow from these enormous ecommerce and Silicon Valley sites, but it’s an evolution rather than a huge step-change. If you look at our market, it has been fairly vanilla with two or three innovations in the past 20 years: in-play, cash-out and bet builder. That’s about it. It’s not a fast-moving industry but, by the same token, we aren’t trying to arrive on the scene with some silver bullet that’s going to change everything. We are focusing on every aspect of the player experience and the technology that supports that experience, so that the entire lifecycle of a customer’s experience is as good as it possibly can be. Those areas include commercial, trading and risk management, third-party integrations and all the bells and whistles you’d expect from a tier-one bookmaker of our size.

EGR: KSP is live in one unnamed market, but what does the roadmap look like to reach a full rollout across Kindred’s core jurisdictions?

BC: What we have been focused on to get us to this point is a very robust, very technologically sound MVP. And 2024 represents a year where we will be available to a very limited testbed. This is good because we are getting real-life data. It’s out in the wild and where it needs to be for us to solve any problems. It also represents the year from a delivery pipeline point of view where you will see what you might call ‘point-of-sale components’, so a bet builder across various sports, or partial cash-out or edit bet. The features and functionality you expect from a sportsbook of our size. At the end of this year and into next year you will see the rollout into our key markets in a controlled manner to allow us to focus on what is absolutely essential for each market. It’s important to stress that when we started this three years ago there wasn’t one line of code; this was brand new. The approach we are taking is that this is very much the sportsbook of tomorrow with futureproofing in mind.

AR: There is a lot of external interest in what we are doing, and we are keen to prove it was wrong for anyone to doubt us. We know it was an important decision [to build KSP] but we also know it was the right decision. I’m so excited for the whole team and everyone who has been a part of KSP to now see it and feel it.