Risk vs Reward: How Fast Track Rewards deepens customisation with AI

Personalisation has become the gold standard in igaming as operators search for ways to stand out to players in increasingly competitive markets. 

Creating a platform that engages players enough to foster loyalty is no easy feat, but advances in AI and automation tools have brought operators success in personalising players’ gaming experiences. Through the collection and analysis of player data, operators have been able to present tailored playing experiences that drastically improve retention.

So far, promotional offers haven’t had the same level of success. Tailoring promotional offers to players based on their preferences and behaviour represents an opportunity to connect with and retain customers – but technological and workload limitations render this difficult. They have become a particular pain point as personalisation options in this area have not kept pace with innovations in other parts of the business.

Instilling player loyalty

“It comes down to loyalty, and that’s why personalisation and being very relevant and personal to the player is something that is a huge trend in industry.” 

Lidzén and his team identified early on that technological barriers were creating challenges that held operators back from improving loyalty.

“When we started off Fast Track, we were all from the igaming industry,” Lidzén explained. “We were working with operators beforehand, and in the process, we noticed how painfully bad the operational tooling and platforms were. “This was really what we identified as the core problem. But then when we started getting into it a little bit more closely, we really managed to put the focus on the fact that every operator needs to win the loyalty of their players, because it’s a very competitive landscape, and that every single casino player plays at multiple casinos.”

Player-focused promotional offers  

There is nowhere where this problem is more prominent than promotional offers. As a key retention tool and one of the first touchpoints new players have with a brand, promotional offers represent a valuable opportunity to hook and engage when done right. 

However, all too often platforms still provide welcome offers in the form of generic deposit matches or free spins, with equally generic promotions and bonuses available to existing customers. It is easy to see how this can lead to player complacency, a lack of enthusiasm and ultimately turnover. As Lidzén noted, “The problem is when everyone has the same offer.”

But tailoring offers to meet the preferences, tendencies and behaviour of players is a lot of work. Accurately profiling players and creating tailored campaigns to give them appropriate welcome offers, or ongoing bonuses, requires an unsustainable amount of manpower to do manually as businesses scale up.

“Every time you segment your players in a new dimension, you have to create new campaigns. You get to a stage where the amount of work it takes to introduce new segments in the process requires so much workload, because you’re exponentially growing.”

Introducing Fast Track Rewards

“If you look at most operators in the market and most platforms, one thing that is typically highly limiting for the operator is their promotional capabilities.” 

This challenge directly inspired the creation of Fast Track’s new offering: Rewards. Leveraging the company’s existing cutting-edge AI behavioural modelling systems, Fast Track Rewards aims to solve this problem by applying its existing industry-leading machine learning and player profiling to promotional offers.

Dubbed the “industry’s first” AI-driven promotional ecosystem, Rewards goes beyond the outdated bonus engines of old by offering personalised bonuses and rewards at scale. “Most [operators] can do free spins, they can do deposit bonuses, but they can’t really navigate outside of that to make more exciting incentives for the players,” Lidzén reflected.

The product plugs into Fast Track’s existing Singularity Model, which allows it to analyse player behaviour using AI and real-time data. The platform lets you build content banks of campaigns, from which the model can pick what offer to give at what time and to whom.

“When we were developing all of these AI capabilities that we have in the core platform [Singularity], the technology started getting more advanced than we could make use of,” Lidzén said.

“We had all of this data being processed, and we had all of these AI models predicting various things, but we didn’t have other systems you could pass on these instructions into. What we decided to do was build a promotional ecosystem and complement our current AI offerings.” 

Rewarding valuable players

Rewards is designed to create promotions that can be truly interesting for players to engage with, which open capabilities for a brand to build on. For example, Rewards features a levelling system, an experience point system and promotional coins that operators can set up to bring various dynamics to the table. It also comes complete with challenges, which are essentially ways of setting up different qualification criteria – say, logging in multiple days in a row or playing a certain game or spinning a certain slot. It’s designed to give players a full experience of the brand, in return for which they get rewarded with experience points or other incentives.

But where it really comes together in a way that makes Fast Track unique in the market is the Singularity Model, Lidzén said. “There are other platforms in the market doing gamification, but where we really differentiate ourselves is with the Singularity Model because you can tell the platform to tailor the levels to the player, so that the difficulty of the level would be personal.

“You can tailor the kind of challenges that you have on the rewards. If you’re a player that typically plays three days in a week, the system may recommend that you play four before you release a bonus. If you’re a player that gets a bonus that is based on wagering, it will be able to identify how much that player needs to increase their wagering in order to release that bonus.

“The model is able to hand pick what offer, what time, and the system automates a super tailored and personal experience for the player.”

These deeply personalised bonuses and rewards are possible thanks to the integration with Fast Track’s core underlying CRM. The CRM platform receives real-time data on player behaviour and conducts advanced behavioural modelling to understand when people want to be contacted, what they want their communications to look like, what offers are most relevant, and how much they need to play in order to release certain offers. Rewards then builds on that to create tangible personalised experiences to make the most of data already held about the player.

Balancing Risk vs Reward

With great rewards, however, come great risks – or so the conventional logic goes. Promotional offers have long caused headaches for operators as they battle bonus abuse and fraud. Automatically releasing personalised offers based on behaviour risks opening up opportunities for players looking to abuse the system.

That’s where Greco comes in. Fast Track entered a joint venture with risk management platform Greco in 2021 and together the two companies have developed what they call the industry’s first gameplay risk engine.

By building a comprehensive database of casino games, they’ve taught their AI models to look at how players play slots in order to identify whether they’re legitimate or non-legitimate players. By combining with the Fast Track’s Singularity Model, Greco is able to take anonymised data and – within seconds of watching player behaviour – understand which players are worth investing in and which aren’t.

“What makes it so exciting is when you combine Rewards into it, you also get the bonus data, so you understand how much you’re bonusing the players and how much you’re paying for it, and then they can complete what we call the true value model. When you understand both how people are playing your games, and the value that you’re giving to the player, you can get the best measure of true value.”

The model can predict how a player is optimising their stakes, and how they are playing bonuses, to be able to see if that is someone that is a legitimate player or if that is someone that is trying to cheat the system.

This partnership doesn’t just identify when a player abuses bonuses after it’s happened – it’s even better than that, Lidzén said. “Even more proactively, if you already have the integration, Greco would probably have avoided you even sending that bonus to that player in the first place.”

This proactive approach is crucial because, as Lidzén explains, bonus abuse is often not caught until after the problem has already occurred. “You always catch it too late, and that’s why this platform is so important,” he added.

“Our clients, people that are working with both Greco and Fast Track right now, they’re telling us that their favourite activity is logging in in the morning and essentially checking before they’re processing all of the pending withdrawals, to see if anyone is trying to cheat the system. They get satisfaction in finding the thieves before they’re taking it.”

Leading AI-driven Rewards technology for the future

As a company at the forefront of integrating large language models into its product offering, Fast Track is leading the way in using AI technology to innovate in igaming.

Lidzén concluded, “I’m really excited about our ability to bring the three products together and really starting to play on the capabilities that they possess as a joint proposition. 

“This year, Rewards is quite fresh out. And while it’s a new product, it’s very comprehensive already. But this year is truly about integrating every single piece of Singularity into Rewards. And the same goes for Greco, making sure that every piece of Greco and Rewards is kind of benefitting from each other, in a perfect symbiosis.”