How did you find this year’s edition of ICE?

With sports betting in the US rapidly evolving and a number of Latin American and African markets becoming more attractive thanks to more sustainable regulation, the 2019 edition of ICE London was the most international yet for Betgenius.

Our stand was packed from start-to-finish, with our fully customisable Sportsbook Platform solution proving especially popular amongst operators of all shapes and sizes. I think what sportsbooks really value is our attitude to control, which we put into practice by allowing every partnership to evolve over time, as an operator’s strategy develops. It’s about empowering brands to succeed and stand out from their competitors, no matter what market they are operating in.

How was 2018 for you as a company and do you have expansion plans for 2019?

2018 was a fantastic year for the Genius Sports Group as a whole. A couple of highlights from last year include gaining our first clients in the newly regulated US sports betting market, such as the ambitious Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, the first tribal casino to offer sports betting outside of Nevada. We also signed a landmark rights partnership with the NBA which was massive validation of our trusted data collection and commercialisation capabilities.

Our global expansion plans have continued into 2019. We’ve invested heavily in both talent and product to develop the local expertise and infrastructure required to best serve our partners in regulated territories worldwide. Just last month we opened our new office in Medellin, Colombia which plays home to 300 employees.

Betting markets worldwide continue to regulate, including Latin America and Africa. Do you think you can succeed in all of these markets?

Absolutely. Whatever the region, the successful operators are those who offer a localised sportsbook.

And that’s exactly what we empower our partners to do. I’ve already alluded to our fully flexible platform, so let’s use our trading solutions as an example here. As the world’s live betting expert, we invest more than any other supplier to ensure our solutions are powered by fast, accurate sports data and are navigated by skilled traders who know the local market.

Moreover, our partners can pick and choose the precise sports, events and markets that their audience crave both pre-match and in-play – and customise at the most granular level, from margin to suspension settings, to stand out from the crowd.

Thanks to the depth and quality of our offering, the flexibility we award and our local expertise, we confidently ensure our partners make their vision a reality in all regulated markets.

What trends do you expect to drive the industry in 2019?

Personalisation of marketing campaigns has been a hot-topic over the past few months with attitudes towards advertising evolving and regulation continually tightening to better protect customers. This is something that we expect to continue throughout 2019.

GDPR restrictions and the whistle-to-whistle ban in the UK are great examples of this and having run betting and iGaming’s only sector-specific digital marketing service for more than a decade, we understand these challenges as well as anybody.

To overcome this, sportsbook operators are increasingly turning to specialists and their technological capabilities to creatively use customer data and consent, and present players with precise odds, markets and promotions at the right time. By running fully-personalised campaigns, operators can confidently drive the lifetime value of customers and cut wasted spend with little manual intervention.