Kindred looks to Facebook Messenger and Alexa to boost customer engagement

Kindred’s innovation subsidiary, Kindred Futures, is looking towards Facebook Messenger and voice recognition technology to boost customer interaction and offer new channels for betting.

Speaking to EGR, Kindred Futures chief Will Mace said the subsidiary had projects and investigations underway with a number of partners, although most were still nascent ideas.

Mace said: “We are looking at interfaces such as Facebook Messenger and Amazon Alexa as new channels for customers to interact and place bets with us on.

“We are also looking at using machine learning techniques to manage risk across our racing product and how we could improve our approach to customer authentication and how we can be smart about meeting the evolving demands of our regulators.”

Elsewhere, Kindred Futures partnering firm Cockroach Labs launched the latest release of its geo-partitioning feature last week which was built in collaboration with Kindred.

The platform uses player data to reduce latency and enable the operator to boost compliance in a number of regulatory environments.

In a statement Kindred said: “We have been beta-testing it extensively throughout its development alongside the team at Cockroach Labs, so we are very excited that it is now released.”

“Our aim with this collaboration is to support Kindred Group’s rapidly growing global customer base with both very high availability and super-low latencies,” the statement said.

“This is vital for the fast moving in-play betting markets that make up much of our business.”

Although the Cockroach Labs partnership started as an investment opportunity with Kindred Futures, the tech start-up has now been brought on-board as a full B2B partner.