Immobile betting

With the mobile in-play sector lacking major innovation in recent years, is the industry’s inertia inviting new competitors into the market? Brad Allen looks at what’s next for the sector

Mobile and tablet are the dominant platforms for sports betting in 2016, driving up to 70% of total revenue at major sportsbooks. Likewise, in-play betting is on its way to overtaking ante post betting at all leading recreational-facing sportsbooks, according to Ladbrokes’ director of trading operations Glynn Carroll.

The combination of these – mobile in-play betting – would therefore seem like the perfect avenue for operators to try and set themselves apart from the competition. This is happening to a certain extent, with apps from bet365 and Unibet among others offering live-streaming with in-play markets and major operators like Ladbrokes claiming that it now develops in-play products as mobile-first.

However the innovation in the sector has been limited according to industry insiders, with most in-play product developments simply copied from desktop to mobile.

“Operators are not really competing,” says Conall McSorley, the commercial director at Metric Gaming, a Las Vegas-based company which provides quick-fire in-play betting products. “There’s a vanilla attitude towards in-play betting products generally and they’re only competing in terms of cash-out or partial cash-out which is the only real product innovation over the last five years.”

Matchbook’s product director Neil Campbell agrees, adding: “Mobile in-running is such a huge proportion of the overall in-running volume, but the mobile aspect is neglected. I think there’s a lot of room to take advantage of the rising spec and speed of mobile devices.”

The relative inertia in the sector is mystifying to McSorley, who argues that a successful sportsbook is now defined by its in-play offering.

“The operators who have developed genuine market share are the ones that have developed the most complete in-play servers,” he says. “I think that’s where the battle for market share takes place, because customer behaviour, particularly on mobile, is going down that route.”

The need for speed

Alderney-based betting exchange Matchbook is perhaps symptomatic of the industry as a whole. Its latest updates to its mobile app focused on achieving platform parity rather than adding any new in-play features, but it has big plans for innovation in 2016.

“It’s a bit like mobile betting itself,” says Campbell. “Back in the early days it was about getting platform parity and then rolling out your special features and add-ons. I think that’s where the mobile in-play sector is now. We’re about to see a big push.”

For Matchbook, that push will be focused on speed, simplicity and personalisation.

Whereas the development of in-play product on desktop has seen the advent of more information, through live-streaming, visualisation tools and cash-out options, mobile in-play offerings could see these frills stripped away in favour of speed.

“The innovation is going to come not from a product perspective but from the user interface (UI),” says Campbell. “It’s about how you put the bet on rather than what you’re betting on. Speed is king and having an uncluttered UI will be very important.”

Getting personal

Another way operators are looking to streamline the in-play process is through increased personalisation – knowing what the user wants to bet on before they know it themselves as Campbell puts it.

McSorley agrees pointing out that to date, operators have been content to cram more and more markets onto a tiny screen, making it difficult for punters to find in-play markets quickly.

“A current sportsbook is like an old shop,” says McSorley, “Customers are asked to walk in and look around to find what they might want, whereas the sportsbook of the future will say: ‘We know exactly what you want and when you want it’”.

In practice, this could mean simple changes like operators placing the sport and markets you’ve previously bet on at the top of your screen. Taking it one step further, users that placed a bet pre-match could be sent push notifications about the cash-out value of their bet.

Matchbook for instance is looking to take advantage of its neutrality over the outcome of its customer’s bets by sending customers previews and in-play trading tips on targeted markets.

“There are various levels,” explains Campbell. “If two customers have a certain amount of metrics that match each other, we can work out what else they might like based on their counterpart. On the more advanced end, we’re looking at things that aren’t widespread at all yet. For example if you’re looking at your phone at 5pm on a Friday, we think you might like to see more previews, whereas if its 3.45pm on a Saturday we could show you in-play trading recommendations.”

According to McSorley, the customisation of content could be taken to the extreme in order to streamline the mobile in-play experience.

“We’re not seeing the verticalisation of sports in mobile like we should be,” he says. “If Metric Gaming was a consumer-facing business, we wouldn’t hand a VIP a phone with one app, we would hand him a phone with 12 apps which are sport-specific.”

This level of granularity is likely not feasible for the majority of operators, and may not even be necessary if the sportsbooks streamlined UI as they plan to.

As Campbell puts it:  “My own feeling is that your app and your platform should be able to provide everything that the customer wants. If we’ve done our personalisation right, then single-sport apps aren’t even a consideration because you should already be being directed to whatever type of bet or market you want.”

Thinking small

Sportsbooks could also be leaving money on the table by overlooking a relatively new type of mobile in-play product known as ‘superlive’, ‘rapidfire’ or ‘micro’ markets.

Essentially these markets offer consumers the chance to bet on what will happen next in a sporting event, whether that is a corner to be awarded in a football match during the next minute, Rory McIlroy to birdie the next hole, or Novak Djokovic to win his next service game to love. One of the advantages of these markets is that they are positioned purely as entertainment products and can be offered with hefty margins, not least because there are no comparison tools available. For example Metric Gaming offers a Maze betting game where punters can bet on the exact sequence of a sporting event (eg the precise scoring progression of a tennis game).

As a result of this gamification, McSorley says punters are approaching these markets with a casino mentality, saying: ‘I’ve got 90 minutes; that’s 50 fivers, let’s have a bit of fun’.

“Ask any operator; they’d rather have 50 fivers in-play at big margins than £250 pre-match,” Sorley adds. But not every operator has embraced these superlive products, for various reasons, meaning the opportunity for growth is “significant,” he says.

Risk and reward

Of course, there are also risks with these markets, as the smaller they get, the easier they are for one rogue participant to fix. In 2010, Pakistani cricketers were convicted of taking bribes to bowl no-balls at specific points in an over. More recently, a report from the Guardian claimed that umpires in low-level professional tennis were delaying inputting the results of points into the official Sportradar data feed, allowing gamblers to get bets down already knowing the results of a point.

While the nature of online in-play betting creates these risks for operators, it also limits them. Any large bets placed on lower-league action sets off alarm bells with operators, while the majority of in-play events are already televised and more difficult to fix.

“We as an industry are wholly independent on the integrity of data providers,” says McSorley. “If it’s compromised, then yes it is a legitimate concern, but there is some inbuilt protection because of the nature of the bets.”

Operators can also face risks from ‘fastest finger first’ type punters looking to beat traders to the punch by being at an event live. It was particularly prevalent in tennis, where the practice was known as courtsiding, but tennis authorities have clamped down on the activity, using networks of scouts, security officials and sometimes police to identify people transmitting scores.

On the bookies’ end Carroll admits that offering such a wide variety of markets means that bookies can be exposed to customers with an edge. However, he adds: “This is nothing new and is part and parcel of the appeal of betting. Having a Trading function that has complete awareness and understanding of the dynamics is a necessity for successful management of the product.”

Sound foundations

Aside from the lack of innovation and fixing concerns, there can also be technical barriers to increasing in-play options. According to McSorley, many operators are still using desktop-centric technology to power apps and mobile sites and there are concerns about the stability of these platforms as more and more third-party products are ‘bolted on’. McSorley cites one major UK-based bookmaker who imposed a moratorium on third-party developments and integration because of just these concerns in March last year.

These types of limitations can be overcome, but to build a foundation to compete in the mobile in-play market, McSorley says you need three things: scalable platform-agnostic technology, a ‘pristine’ data feed and algorithms based on robust historical data.

Blood in the water?

These are the types of things that Matchbook and the rest of the industry is just putting into place, but the gap in the market is not going unnoticed by the rest of the online gaming industry. McSorley believes the gamification of in-play betting is attracting a number of casino operators into the sportsbook space, who are on the hunt for “one-armed bandits for sports bettors”.

Mobile gaming firm LeoVegas made the jump in January by partnering with Swedish firm Kambi to offer a full sportsbook on a mobile platform under the LeoVegas name. Swedish firms Cherry and Mr Green also announced plans to offer a sportsbook in February, while McSorley said that Metric Gaming itself is in high-level talks to provide a ‘casino industry leader’ with a full sportsbook.

“It’s very much driven by the in-play option,” he says. “Casino operators are used to communicating with their users about what they’ve won, what’s available, offering personalised content for them, and customising the experience. These are the same tools needed to be successful at mobile in-play betting, and casinos have realised their communications and technology is quite advanced compared with the sportsbooks.”

Campbell also warned that casinos could seek to enter the mobile in-play market based on their experience handling a lot of quick bets “down to the nanosecond” and offering intuitive ways of placing bets through a mobile screen – think flicking casino chips onto certain parts of a dartboard for example.

“When you think about it, because it’s a higher margin product, it makes sense that you could build a live-betting-only platform based on the core technology of an online casino without too much trouble,” says Campbell. “It’s not inconceivable that we will see a lot of people enter the market as live betting specialists on mobile.”

Of course, sportsbooks are already scrambling to improve their own in-play technology offerings, helped by a series of mergers which should see expanded R&D and technology budgets. But operators had better move fast. While the Brazil World Cup saw the explosion of mobile betting, Euro 2016 will be the biggest in-play event ever, McSorley believes, thanks to terrestrial coverage, the presence of the Home Nations (except for Scotland) and the favourable time zone.

“There’s a battle-ground brewing between now and 10 June,” warns McSorley, with the battle lines drawn around the speed of mobile in-play offerings, the ability to engage bettors with intuitive interactions and the rollout of personalised markets and content.

Forewarned is forearmed.