Collaborating on the sportsbook of the future

It pays to be different in the ultra-competitive sportsbook vertical, and if there’s one thing leading operators fear, it is the thought of offering their customers a plain, commoditised product.

With a strong heritage in sports betting, Kambi are pioneers in managed sports betting services. We understand it’s much more than simply software and that the requirements are constantly evolving. To compete at the top level, operators must offer a unique sportsbook proposition to their players.

In today’s market, the most agile and innovative Sportsbook service providers, like Kambi, need to supply outsourced solutions which hand control back to the operator.

Collaborative sourcing

Taking a traditional turnkey outsourcing approach no longer offers the flexibility demanded by the biggest operators, especially when it comes to delivering on brand promises. But bringing your sportsbook inhouse – while providing full flexibility – can quickly become extremely complex, with large tech and trading teams required.

That’s why Kambi has devised a new hybrid model, which we refer to as collaborative sourcing. Collaborative sourcing combines the best elements of turnkey and in-house, giving operators the advantages of cost-saving while empowering them to innovate and differentiate on top of the outsourced platform. This model allows for more efficiency, innovation and product development collaboration. Kambi can already see examples of operators in the network offering unique and differentiating experiences built on top of our platform. We firmly believe that empowering our operators is the best way to drive sportsbook growth and innovation.

Empowering operators 

Kambi’s robust back-end and flexible frontend, with a strong emphasis on our APIs and real-time data distribution, gives operators the solid foundations upon which to differentiate.

We leave it to the operators to decide how much they want to invest in differentiation; some operators make just a few minor tweaks to our sportsbook, while others have development teams focused solely on the Kambi platform, creating content to enhance and tailor the UX and delight their players.

The top-tier sportsbook operators tend to fall into the latter camp. Just look at Unibet, which reported a 21% increase in revenues in FY201 and continue to trial new, innovative and differentiating sportsbook features such as voice-recognition technology. This functionality was built in-house on Kambi’s APIs, in partnership with a third-party technology provider.

Another example is the recently floated LeoVegas, which went far beyond traditional branding and skinning by optimising Kambi’s flexible front-end clients to perfectly align with the user journeys its players are accustomed to on its award-winning gaming platform. This effectively blurs the lines between the verticals and offers a coherent user interface across all channels.

Several of the operators in our network are also using the data insights drawn from our product to create a more personalised experience for players. The Kambi platform is designed to facilitate this process, both in terms of data collection and by offering an adaptable front-end that operators can customise.

Moving fast

Previously, operators would ask platform providers for a new piece of functionality, and the provider would go away and spend weeks or even months attempting to add it. This approach is simply too slow for the current market, where operators have unprecedented access to data on their customers and need to react quickly to it.

So how does a platform provide this speed of resolution? The Kambi platform is built to find synergies across our network of operators, and then use our technical resources to optimise the core betting processes and user journeys that affect all players. With the basics in place, we are handing operators the freedom to innovate on top of the platform with their own resources.

Operators clearly want to invest in differentiated products, but remain reluctant to take the full cost of this in-house. Kambi’s collaborative sourcing approach provides an affordable model for the future of innovation.

At Kambi, we believe the most successful operators will be those dedicated to creating a unique proposition on top of our platform, and our focus is firmly on facilitating this process. We will likely see other operators working with third parties on new innovative ideas, so a platform must be agile enough to cope with the demands.

To really drive our sector forward, we need to empower operators to focus on what they know best, and if we listen to their needs and provide a platform designed with differentiation in mind, anything is possible.