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Africa – when potential translates to demand

| By Josephine Watson | Reading Time: 3 minutes
High-growth markets such as Africa require rapid scalability and differentiation, says NSoft
Davor Konjevod is a Regional Sales Manager for Africa at NSoft. He has extensive business experience, having worked in EU and Asia. Aluwani Mukhudwana is Sales Manager for the African region at NSoft. He has worked with current and future market leaders within the industry.  Especially in high-growth markets such as Africa, understanding new technologies will be essential to scalable success and differentiation in an increasingly crowded market. This is the view of Davor Konjevod, regional sales manager at NSoft, who recently spoke with iGaming Business about the market activity in Africa. Konjevod cites figures from Doing Business 2019, which captured a record of 314 regulatory reforms between June 2, 2017, and May 1, 2018. A total of 107 reforms were in the economies of Sub-Saharan Africa – a number NSoft feels is indicative of the fast pace the region requires. “We’re traditionally very strong in Central and Eastern Europe, but the fastest growth we’re experiencing in Africa’s large market and we are fully aware of the huge potential that this region has.”

Africa’s rising opportunities

Adding to the conversation. Aluwani Mukhudwana, regional sales manager at NSoft says that sportsbook has without a doubt been a key point of interest for African players, and NSoft has worked closely with its customers the world over to ensure they meet the demand. “Even though the sportsbook is very popular, and will continue to grow, all aspects of the African industry will continue to register a growth of the mobile and online channels and NSoft is closely monitoring the market movements,’’ Davor adds. For NSoft’s self-managed pre-match application, Mukhudwana explains that using Betradar’s MTS allows small and medium customers to focus on marketing, providing more certainty in terms of profit and reducing operational costs in the meantime. “Once they get to the point they are big enough that they want to take risk management in their own hands, we provide the option to continue working with us through the self-managed application. As an alternative of printed pre-match betting offers, NSoft has developed on-screen rotating visualisations with GUI-based configuration depending on different and specific clients’ needs,” adds Mukhudwana. ‘’Africa’s low internet speed coverage represents one of the main issues for betting businesses around the continent, so NSoft adjusted its products for the satellite stream solution, which is currently in the testing phase by selected clients’’, adds Konjevod. Omnichannel presence as the imperative NSoft creates interactive games to be played in a variety of settings, from users’ phones and computers to retail terminals and betting shops. The games and apps are developed in-house and licensed to providers and retailers across the world. “Our games can be easily integrated into other platforms and we can customise our games to clients in their native language across the 30-plus countries we serve,” said Davor. Additionally, NSoft developed Seven, a platform for managing core betting business operations. Aulwani says this means that betting operators who were previously juggling a plethora of games and sportsbooks from different providers can now consolidate everything on NSoft’s platform.Explaining Seven’s power, Aluwani emphasises: ‘’Seven includes modules, applications, and APIs that serve as a foundation for stacking products and offering them to their operator clients. To simplify implementation and lower the client’s investment in new hardware needed for retail channels, NSoft has developed a pre-installed mini PC that satisfies all client requirements to run NSoft Seven products. “Nevertheless, in the internet era, web and mobile betting solutions have become very popular, demanding multiple payment methods for players, so NSoft is developing a service that aims to implement easy integration of payment methods into the Seven platform, enabling the integration of more than 200 different payment methods.’’ NSoft’s research shows that players in the African market like to combine web and retail channels. To meet this demand, NSoft’s prepare a bet feature enables the players to prepare their bets on the web, generate code, and with that code, they can easily do their pay-in in retail shops. This way, bet generation becomes faster, simplifying operators’ job and accelerating in-shop operations. Additionally, NSoft’s web-hosted 7Shop is another upgrade designed upon Africa’s market needs. Due to the very low hardware and software resources in African shops, NSoft has developed this web-based cashier application that requires only a web browser solution to run.

Innovation in developing markets

Improving the existing features and adding new developments in order to satisfy the market needs is imperative, especially in developing markets, and Nsoft has a company-wide aspiration to tackle the new and challenging. This is how the idea of their new product, Vision. was born. The idea behind Vision is to use CCTV systems for more than just surveillance, not only keeping the premises safe, but by doing so understanding customer behavior at any given moment. Ultimately, that’s just one small bit of a complete smart package. Aluwani explains: “Simply put, Vision is an AI video management software created with the user experience as a top priority providing support for easy-to-use tools for feature management, analysis, and utilisation of video data and image data.’’ Features such as facial recognition, as well as age and gender prediction, enable software users to identify their customers in relation to their business. Technologies such as this will continue to shape operators’ approaches to developing markets such as Africa, providing security and stability as new opportunities arise.

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