Savvas Fellas, managing director of Lindar Media, believes companies need to have their own native solutions internally instead of being reliant upon the aggregator, as he spoke at the SBC Summit Barcelona – Digital.
Speaking on the ‘Innovation in Slots‘ panel Fellas emphasised the conflict of innovation coming from both the platform and the soft developers side of the industry.
He explained: “It’s interesting that people like Pragmatic and Iconic and Play’n Go have their in house tournament engines, which is really nice but when you, as the operator, are mainly focused on your customer journey that kinda goes out the window when you have all these different UI’s and they’re all branded differently. We shouldn’t neglect these kind of things, what they are doing is great but it’s not universal.
“From the operator perspective they have all the real core data, they have the single customer view that will allow them to create something that is a more universal cross vendor.
“You can very easily spin up a tournament that allows you to set up tournaments based on wins and wages, you can give cash and free spin credit because it comes from the aggregator level but it does highlight the need to be able to do that internally because not everything is taken by the aggregator so you’re just bound by their slots.”
As part of the panel, Fellas was joined by Tobias Svensen, CEO at CasinoGrounds, Josefine Hellstrom, head of casino at Casumo, Nicolas Van Malderghem, head of casino at Napoleon Sports and Casino and Vladimir Malakchi, chief business development officer at Evoplay Entertainment with Alexandre Tomic, co-founder of Alea, moderating the session.
Countering Fellas point, Alexandre Tomic, stated: “What we would like to see is a B2B platform that comes and allows the operator to provide that content without having to buy the content from an aggregator. As an operator I don’t want to be dependent on anyone from that and buy their contract to add fees on top of that.”
Van Malderghem agreed with Fellas’ point and highlighted the issues his company faces in Belgium: “A lot of suppliers create ways to offer tournaments but what we are looking at is to also have the tournament to have specific skill layers on top of the game without having the game bound to specific suppliers,” he added.
“In Belgium slot games are less popular than the dice games which have a skill element to it. We want to have the added value of a layer of tournaments above but that’s something that one supplier can’t offer.”
The debate then started to become heated when Fellas’ followed on from Van Malderghem’s point by stating the company doesn’t own the website’s IP going on to claim taking third party content diminishes the sites value.
Tomic hit back claiming: “When a buyer comes to you and you tell the buyer that you built everything yourself and maintain everything yourself, they prefer to see that you’ve integrated 20 of the best providers within your platform and it knows how to handle it than develop everything yourself.”
Fellas, who agreed with Tomic’s point, went on to state: “I think you need to know what battles to pick. When we first launched we wanted to build an affiliate platform, we wanted to build the chat and bingo. You take that data and you have it natively and build loads of tools around and I don’t think it should be forfeited for a third party.”
Hellstrom chipped in to note: “What we’ve seen lately is that a lot of the operators don’t have that tech back to build these products themselves. That’s why we’ve seen more companies assist and better aim at retaining our players instead of putting the focus on product innovation.”
SBC Summit Barcelona – Digital is a FREE to attend virtual conference and exhibition running from 8-11 September. To register for your free ticket or find out more please visit – https://sbcevents.com/sbc-summit-barcelona-digital/