Speed is the product: ICONIC21 on what really separates live casino providers

A few years ago, operators tended to fall into distinct camps: live casino specialists on one side, and sportsbook- and slot-focused brands on the other.

Today, that divide has largely disappeared. Live casino sits at the heart of most operator casino strategies, evolving from a niche vertical into a core product category that drives engagement, differentiation and growth.

Part of the reason is that players have changed what they want from it. Expectations have hardened. They come looking for interaction, atmosphere and visibility now, and they notice quickly when a table gives them none of those things.

The scale of that appetite is easy to underestimate. Active consumer participation in live gaming has reached an all-time high, with a global community of 3.6 billion connected players engaging in interactive experiences worldwide. That is the backdrop to live casino emerging as one of the strongest growth areas in online gambling in 2026.

The more interesting shift, though, has happened on the business side. Operators have stopped shopping for a catalogue. What they are after now is a partner who is in constant communication with them, who understands their brand, their players and their timelines, and who can move at the speed those timelines actually demand.

The providers who have grown fastest through this period are the ones who stopped selling finished games off a shelf and started building around each partner’s specific gaps.

Everyone can ship the same tables

Much of the core content is now shared. Everyone has blackjack, everyone has roulette, and a player would struggle to tell one supplier’s version from another’s on the felt alone. When the product is common property, the product cannot be the differentiator.

What sits behind it can be. Two providers can ship what looks like the same blackjack table. One delivers it as a generic table pulled from a shared feed. The other delivers it built around a brand and, just as importantly, on that brand’s timeline. Those are two very different things arriving under the same name, and we decided early on that we at ICONIC21 wanted to be firmly in the second camp.

So, we reframed our whole commercial model around it. We moved away from a transactional, delivery-focused way of working towards something closer to a consultative partnership, with engagement that carries on across the life of the relationship rather than stopping the moment a contract is signed.

“A partner who takes weeks to turn around a change request is… always a step behind their operator’s own market”

In practice, that means we don’t walk in with a fixed roadmap and ask a client to fit around it. Instead, we start from their growth strategy and build to fill the gaps in it, which keeps our roadmap deliberately flexible.

We talk to partners about the players they are chasing and the holes in their product, and then we close them. Our recent 18-table dedicated studio with Stake, launched in record time, is what that looks like when it works.

The gap that mattered

I came to this from watching what happened after deals were done.

When we became independent, the gap between signing an agreement and getting a partner live stopped being an operational detail and started looking like the whole game.

Tier 1 operators, I realised, were not simply looking for content to be handed to them. They were looking for someone to genuinely help them, and the ones I spoke to responded to that far more than to any line item in a portfolio.

The clearest confirmation came when we launched bespoke dedicated studios ahead of the six-month timeline the market had come to treat as normal. The feedback from operators was immediate, and it told me the timeline itself had been a quiet frustration for years.

The iGaming space is relentlessly dynamic. New markets open, player expectations move and new formats appear more or less constantly. A partner who takes weeks to turn around a change request is, in practical terms, always a step behind their operator’s own market. None of this is an argument for speed at any cost. The point is to execute well and at pace, consistently, rather than heroically.

Are you built for speed – or just saying it?

Speed is an easy thing to claim and a hard thing to be built for, and the difference shows in how a company is organised long before it shows in a pitch.

We run a lean, focused team on purpose. It lets us avoid the organisational complexity that tends to slow larger providers down, and that is what allows us to offer partners genuine pace without trading away quality to get there.

Becoming independent also gave us licence to redesign how our commercial and delivery teams work alongside each other. We put in new protocols, clearer tracking and direct coordination between the client and the technical side, so information stops getting lost in the handovers.

When I stepped into the CCO role, the thing I most wanted was for being fast, consistent and effective to be a property of the process itself. If a provider only reaches those things through a big push and a fortnight of panic on a given project, that is usually a sign the system underneath was never designed for the pace being promised.

What we had to change internally

The biggest change we had to make internally was philosophical. We had to move the company’s mindset away from being a delivery-focused supplier and towards being a consultative partner, and then get every department behind that – not only the client-facing ones.

“Customisation and speed have to be engineered into the system from the ground up”

The concrete work followed from there. We restructured business development and shaped a new commercial strategy, brought in new protocols and tracking systems built around player growth, and worked to make sure each new operator felt like a partner rather than a customer on a ticket.

The communication model became continuous instead of periodic. Rather than saving everything for a formal quarterly review, we work with partners on a rolling basis, share roadmaps months ahead and stay close enough to their strategy to see a gap forming before they have to raise it.

If there is one lesson I would hand to anyone trying to follow this path, it is that customisation and speed have to be engineered into the system from the ground up. They are painfully difficult to add once everything else is already in place.

Branding and speed are the same argument

There is a related shift I have watched happen in parallel, which is that branding now carries more weight than it once did. A dedicated, branded environment signals exclusivity, gives a partner a cohesive identity and builds a kind of player loyalty that a shared table simply cannot generate.

“A branded studio is only worth having if it can be built quickly, on the operator’s timeline”

Big operators increasingly look to branding as the way they stand apart from everyone, drawing on the same content. It cannot stop at a logo dropped onto a table, though, which is why we treat a branded studio as an attempt to embody everything the partner wants that environment to be.

This is where branding and speed turn out to be the same argument rather than competing ones. A branded studio is only worth having if it can be built quickly, on the operator’s timeline. Deliver it late and the brand moment it was meant to capture has already gone.

Speed gets a partner live, branding makes them recognisable, and both come out of the same underlying commitment to a continuous relationship rather than a one-off transaction.

A strong game portfolio no longer protects you

That leaves the providers still competing largely on their catalogue exposed.

A strong portfolio has become the price of entry, and the price of entry protects no one, least of all in a market that is consolidating while newer entrants undercut on price.

Our own history is the cautionary version of it. Early on, we shipped good, classical games and discovered that a strong product, on its own, did not get us into the pipeline, for the simple reason that dozens of other providers had the same tables to offer.

What actually changed our trajectory was rebuilding the business around partnership and speed rather than around the next release.

So my advice to any provider competing chiefly on portfolio is to change the question. Stop asking “what is our next great game?” and start asking “what can we deliver for a partner that a competitor cannot simply license as well?”

The relationship, and the speed you can bring to it, are the honest answers. The game, it turns out, was never really the point.