Can gambling truly be considered a technology industry?

Is Airbnb a hospitality company? Is Uber a taxi rank service? Is Deliveroo a food delivery service? Or are they technology companies? We could debate it all day. What’s interesting is to consider how they view themselves.

How does this apply in gaming? Are operators providers of gambling services or technology companies that operate in the gambling sector? What’s the difference? How does it help?

I can only speak of our own journey and how we think adopting the philosophy of the latter has and will continue to help us grow. We launched MrQ.com in August 2018. Our platform is powered through a suite of products built internally after three years of hard work and our development team is made up of four people. We are not plagued by legacy code, there are no red tapes to cut through and only a few egos to wrestle with when it comes to strategic decisions. One of the big advantages for us is our microservice-based architecture coupled with our small passionate team. This gives us the ability to deal with the changing and rocky landscape we find ourselves in.

When the new changes to the LCCP were announced in early 2019 and were required to be live by early May, it was this technology structure that allowed us to pivot around our code without disruption and with time to spare. If there is an issue with one of our microservices e.g. bingo, we don’t crumble, everything else operates as normal. Now that the use of credit cards will be banned from April, we will be ready to turn them off. The same can be said for a potential limit on wagers. At the end of each quarter, when it comes to quarterly returns it’s relatively simple to access the data to prepare for submission. Our submissions are on time and if you were to map our time spent on returns on a line chart over time, they wouldn’t spike each quarter. Technology makes us efficient.
The power of tech
Maybe we’re not so different to our peers. Maybe we’re all in the same technology boat together. Although based on the size of the fines and the trivial nature of some of them I doubt it because it’s that same technology that could have helped avoid those pitfalls. Great technology can not only help the commercial side of the business but also to relieve the mounting pressures of regulation.

There is increasing noise around content personalisation but we’re still not there yet, so much so that there are new companies that have made it their mission to offer this to operators as a third-party solution.  MrQ.com is on course to have something live this year. As a small UK-based operator it doesn’t make sense to keep extending the supply chain, we have a margin to protect and the technology will help us protect it.

But what about using technology to spot irregular trends in wagers/deposits or insufficient documentation for customers who have met certain EDD/AML/SOF thresholds or are we going to need third-party providers to do this for us too?

There are venture capital firms which now use AI driven technology to reduce the painful number of man hours needed to find new investment opportunities. They do this extremely well and in a fraction of the time. If we use technology to reduce the physical people needed to run an operation then perhaps we will also eliminate human error and increase efficiencies too.

One day we also might have the problem of being a clunky operator with fat all around the edges. For now, our spring chicken legs enjoy the agility that the technology provides. While we can debate if we are a gambling operator or a technology company all day, it’s technology that puts that spring in our step.

Savvas Fellas is the managing director of Lindar Media which owns and operates MrQ.com. Launched in late 2018, its platform has attracted the eyes and ears of the gaming industry as an emerging platform and was awarded the 2019 prestigious EGR Rising Star award.