Friday view: Putting sports at the core
Interwetten board director and CEO Werner Becher discusses his firmâs mobile sportsbook development, which has seen the operator derive 50% of revenues from mobile
Interwetten has been offering mobile solutions to its clients since 2004, and we have been working for more than 10 years on the continuous improvement of our mobile products. Today, mobile channels make up almost half of Interwettenâs revenues. And we even increased our efforts some months ago to be perfectly well prepared for the FIFA World Cup.
We have a very clear strategy on our core sports betting product and all other channels with a dedicated provider accommodating all our needs in real-time. This cooperation ensures we have all the necessary know-how and experience and enables us to set priorities without been dependent on unreliable external partners.
Mobile channels of Interwetten are an integrated part of our software suite allowing us very short go-to-market durations and offering a unique product with already learned usability for our customers. We see our specific competitive advantage in being extremely attentive to our customersâ needs and wish-lists.
Usability is on top of our list of priorities. Our customers enjoy a clearly arranged, easy-to-use front end in order to place bets and play casino games with maximum comfort. Catching up with new trends and reading the signs of the times at a very early stage, such as mobile apps including app-store marketing, are success factors in mobile business. Waiting until others are already successful with a new mobile product and then copying them is definitely not our way as we think it wouldn´t be successful in most cases. Therefore, we try to respond to changes in consumer behavior instantly. This strategy is supported by flat hierarchies that allow for fast decision making.
One of the basic assumptions guiding product development in the mobile segment is our customersâ mobility and time constraints. People are on the go and donât have much time. Therefore, speed is a decisive element that counts much more for mobile users than for desktop users â the placement of bets and the accessibility of results have to be much faster. Customers using mobile channels prefer bets on events starting shortly or to bet on live events. In the evening mobile devices are more and more used as second screens in parallel to watching TV. Getting the attention of such users and binding them to your product and your brand with an interesting offering is becoming increasingly important.
We are convinced our mobile platform will increase in importance to a great extent. It will become even more important as it is already today. We are currently the market leader in our core markets considering that more than 60% of all bets during the FIFA World Cup were placed through mobile devices. We obviously aim at keeping this position and strengthen it even further. We will continue working on the development of our mobile products in the future in order to keep on offering our clients the best possible mobile solution for sports-betting and casino games. At the same time most companies are still investing much more money in their desktop version than in their mobile channels although this is contrary to what their KPIs are telling them.