Q&A: How GiG plans to scale and industrialise in 2024

EGR: It’s been nearly six months since joining GiG after having previously held leadership roles at SBTech, DraftKings and Bragg. What attracted you to the company?

Richard Carter (RC): I knew the business reasonably well given GiG powers many leading tier-one online casino and sports operators, so I had a good understanding of the group’s sports technology, people and its customers. However, during a period of due diligence prior to me joining, I discovered that the teams had built a next generation, highly modular, scalable, new technology platform based on microservices. The benefit of that being material time savings on third-party integrations, speed to deployment and entering new regulatory markets and, more importantly, without the technical debt of legacy competitor platforms.

The company’s strong infrastructure and future 2024-25 roadmap were a key attraction for me because, if you look around the industry today, a lot of our competitors are built on legacy systems which are potentially problematic when looking to expand into new markets with different regulations. It means writing code is becoming more expensive and harder to maintain, so more inefficient.

The offer to join GiG was the most interesting opportunity I’d seen in the last few years. The chemistry and alignment with the board and its shareholders was very positive and I am really looking forward to driving our progression through 2024 and for the GiG team to deliver for its customers and shareholders. We have a very exciting pipeline of new products and features that we will deliver this year which will allow GiG to compete ever more aggressively, and we are really looking forward to showcasing exactly what these are at ICE London.

EGR: There have been several new senior hires at GiG recently, including some colleagues who were part of your journey at SBTech. What does this team bring to GiG?

RC: On joining the company, I identified gaps in the business that the board agreed we could fill by hiring the right people to support growth.

I brought in Andrew Cochrane as chief business officer and James Coxon as chief operating officer; both have a proven track record of success and scaling businesses. At SBTech, we scaled from 300 to over 1,000 staff and from mid-20 to over 70 operators. Matt Saxon has also joined as chief technology officer from Sportradar, to help support and nurture the GiG technology teams and lay the foundations to underpin our medium-term growth objectives.

We now have the skillsets that were missing at GiG to propel this business forward and significantly scale revenues and new customers as well as supporting existing customer growth. We have the experience of how to scale, of what to do and what not to do to help mitigate scaling/growth risks and deliver the opportunities that lie ahead.

EGR: Looking at the year ahead, what are your core focus areas?

RC: Our number one focus is to materially increase the cadence and pipeline of launching new clients, of which we’ve launched three so far in 2024. Our other key area of focus is on regulated markets; for example, we’re making a significant push into Canada, Brazil, Peru and UK.

Elsewhere, we believe we have a very, very significant opportunity in sports betting. We’ve added a lot of new features to our sportsbook and have significantly upgraded the risk management and trading tools. We are looking forward to showcasing this very shortly.

Finally, we have dramatically scaled up and are in the process of industrialising our new modular microservice platform, Core X, and we expect to see a strong take up of new product offering as we go through 2024 and beyond. 

EGR: Given there has been considerable investment in GiG’s people of late, what other business areas will be key for investment this year?

RC: One business area we haven’t really made much noise about is GiG Data and Logic. It uses AI to develop data models that support operators to simplify their operations, such as CRM, and give real-time insights which allow for more impactful interactions and therefore higher ROIs. This should help our clients extract more efficiency and profitability from their businesses. This is going to be an important key vertical for us in 2024.

EGR: What do you see as the biggest challenges for GiG and the wider industry in 2024?

RC: Regulation is always going to be front and centre for GiG, and for most organisations given it presents such an existential threat to our business. But, looking specifically at GiG, I would say a key challenge will be industrialising our new GiG Core X platform and improved Sport X sportsbook as well as delivering a major step up in new customer launches in 2024.

I believe we have a very compelling tier-one sportsbook, but getting companies to change sportsbooks is quite difficult. That’s definitely going to be a challenge but one we are excited to embrace.

As we grow, increasing and maintaining operational excellence will be something we remain laser-focused on. We want to look after our existing customers and provide them with an unparalleled level of service so they continue to grow strongly while simultaneously make sure we launch new customers with exceptional products and service.

Richard Carter joined GiG as CEO for Platform & Sportsbook in September 2023, bringing extensive experience at executive level from within the igaming industry.

As CEO of SBTech for close to five years, he led the company’s merger with digital sports entertainment and gaming company DraftKings through a three-way deal with Diamond Eagle Acquisition Corp in April 2020.

Most recently, Carter was CEO of Bragg; a Nasdaq and TSX-listed online casino and gaming platform provider. Prior to SBTech, he was a director of research at Deutsche Bank, responsible for leading its highly rated Pan-European Gaming Equity Research franchise.