What is your assessment of your company's performance and growth in 2023 in general? Was it as expected or did it exceed your expectations? 

Mateo: We continue to be the industry leader and its trusted partner because we have developed enduring and valued relationships with our clients and partners that only deepen due to our innovative capabilities. Our best-in-class content portfolio is the fuel which powers our existing products and robust recurring revenues. It is also the catalyst for further core revenue growth, product innovation, deeper monetization, and value creation. 

2023 was an exciting year at Sportradar and it has us well-positioned and looking forward to the opportunities ahead of us in the new year. 

What are your company's main goals/objectives for 2024 in the Brazilian market? And on a global level? 

Mateo: Sportradar is working hard in Brazil with a strong focus on Managed Trading Services or MTS, Ad:s and AV. Brazilian soccer is huge and for this reason, we seek to go deeper and deeper in our coverage, which is going very well attending some of the main leagues. 

The sports betting market has significantly evolved in recent years, the Brazilian market has enormous potential. With the regulation, the industry celebrates this achievement and moves towards 2024 full of work and growth for everyone.

Globally, looking forward to 2024 we expect to continue on our growth trajectory by leveraging our enhanced content portfolio, which will feature our global NBA and ATP rights, and achieving improved monetization across our product portfolio as we serve the downstream market with value-added products and services. 

What do you think were the most influential facts or developments during 2023 for the firm? 

Mateo: Artificial Intelligence (AI) has really come to the fore this year, with greater adoption of the technology across all industries and sectors, while the introduction of generative AIapplications like ChatGPT and other services have taken the tech into the mainstream. 

At Sportradar, we are continually evaluating how to harness new and emerging technologies to problem solve for clients and drive business value. We understand that AI holds enormous potential across all of our products and services, but we’ve paid special attention to the development of our Computer Vision capabilities as a way to enhance our products with a greater volume of data and insight. 

In your industry, what themes or technological advances do you think will dominate the market in 2024? What will be the future trends? 

Mateo: One of the themes is Customer Retention – Why operators need to streamline the User Experience to engage the next generation of bettors. 

The customer relationship with data and insight is changing. In today’s distraction rich media landscape, bettors seem less inclined to scroll through match statistics and league tables to find an insight that they can place a bet on, preferring to engage with snackable analysis delivered in real-time, like the insights delivered by Sportradar’s BET Insight tool. 

This is something that appears to be particularly true amongst the next generation of bettors, those mobile first digital natives most likely to be under 35 years old, who view this process as too much like hard work. 

It’s an interesting development. The appetite for data and insight amongst bettors remains high, we know they engage with sports data more deeply than casual sports fans do, but they want ease of access to content that’s relevant to a match their interested in. 

The industry is increasingly moving to meet the needs of Next Gen Bettors. 

What’s more, in today’s attention economy, operators are competing with a multitude of brands for the attention of sports fans. There are billions of data points captured in sport each year, it's not humanly possible to go through that volume of data manually and pull out everything that will add value to the sports betting experience. 

That’s where Artificial Intelligence-driven solutions like Sportradar’s BET Insights are coming into play, making it easier for operators to serve bettors useful content. The AI models within BET Insights process the data and push out something meaningful for bettors consider in real-time. 

As the next generation of bettors grow in numbers, so they grow in significance to operators as a source of revenue. Making sure the User Experience meets their needs is going to be critical to an operator’s success. 

What is your general opinion about the regulation of the sports betting and online gaming market in Brazil? 

Mateo: The betting industry is constantly evolving, with changes in regulation creating new challenges and opportunities for operators. As a partner to hundreds of operators within the industry, it is important that we are responsive to regulatory changes and help our clients engage with their customers in compliant ways. 

Latin America is currently a mix of regulated and unregulated markets. When you regulate the market, and we had this experience in Argentina and Colombia, local and international brands tend to strengthen and grow the market. Regarding the region, Brazil is naturally the main market due to the size of the country and population, we have been working hard in Brazil in the last few years, and we were awaiting, like the entire market, the regulation of sports betting. 

Brazil is a dynamic market and it will become even bigger after the regulation. Furthermore, soccer is the most popular sport in Brazil and with regulation for sports betting, demand for soccer content in the region is likely to increase. Sportradar is well positioned to address this demand with a market-leading portfolio of soccer products and solutions. 

What trends do you see in the gaming industry and how is the company positioned in order to take advantage of them during 2024? 

Mateo: I mentioned customer retention and I highlighted AI. The digital ecosystem cannot be understood without AI. 

At Sportradar, AI is embedded into the core of the ORAKO solution. Since the company’s 2022 acquisition of Vaix, the artificial intelligence specialists for the igaming industry, we have integrated the technology extensively across our range of services, and I believe it’s going to transform the user experience, changing how bettors engage with sports betting products in the future.  

Moving forward, operators will personalize their products to meet the interests and preferences of individual customers rather simply include customersin segments. With ORAKO, the AI driven player journey starts when the player gets first time to the site or application, and not when the customer registers and logs-in, which helps not only personalizing but in the conversion of those visitors into customers. 

The technology allows us to provide different components with different preferences and filtering capabilities, while also helping us make sure that the product the customer sees is relevant to them. It is how I think the user experience should be. The actual interaction between the player and the product should be intimate and to achieve that, AI is allowing us to process much faster and to understand much better in real time what the user is going to do.