Carsten Koerl and Jason Robins opened SBC Summit Barcelona – Digital

SBC Summit Barcelona – Digital is a FREE to attend virtual conference and exhibition running this week, from 8-11 September.

The two industry pioneers discussed about the sportsbetting business in a post COVID-19 environment, with the moderation of Sue Schneider.

“In two days we lost 99% of live matches, the fuel which we need to have to offer our products,” Koerl said. “All of a sudden you saw all the markets around the world shutting down in two or three days”. He added that he called the bankers and asked them: How much money do I have in the private account, how can I shift that over to help the company if necessary? What is our burn rate? And I did something which I hadn’t done in 20 years – a rolling cash flow plan.”

He said that they had to be creative, and that the firm tripled the number of live matches within the crisis without normal content, and that it was the key to success for them in that period.

Besides, Robins said that he believes that the emergence of COVID and its impact on trading has had a transformative effect on the stock markets, which started thinking beyond next quarter, “because no one could make any sense of what the upcoming quarter’s results were going to be”, he added.

With his team, he focused on how to engage their customers without traditional sports on television. The first thing they did was creating pools around television shows and political debates, and expand into alternative sports like Korean baseball and table tennis. “We integrated with Carsten’s company, streaming from a number of these sports because you couldn’t watch them easily every day”, he added.

“Lastly we talked about how we make sure we’re as positively positioned to compete and win as possible on the other side of this thing. We talked about making sure we had plenty of capital, which we did. We talked about making sure that we were making investments in product innovation and things we thought we could roll out in the fourth quarter.”

When talking about the near future, Koerl predicted that a greater need for cash is likely to generate new openings, and cash will be generated by taxes for the governments. He thinks it will probably accelerate market openings and provide opportunities. “We see this already in the US.” To register or find out more visit – https://sbcevents.com/sbc-summit-barcelona-digital/