Trading places

Mike Read, co-founder and head of product of newly-launched FX trading app Pelican on why integrated, customisable chat functions are the next major step-change for mobile sportsbooks

Sportsbooks have enjoyed quite the decade; the relentless march of technology has transformed an expensive retail shop estate that provided a limited service, into a world where a punter has access to a 24-hour bookmaker on their smartphones providing more markets than ever before.

However, there hasn’t been a real game changing innovation in mobile sportsbooks since cash out, which is all the more reason why operators should be looking closely at how their current apps and platforms will cope with the next wave of technological disruption.

As every mobile app developer knows, the ultimate goal is to increase user retention, return-to-app rates and session times. While cash out functionality has undoubtedly achieved this to a degree, there are other sectors in the field that have made great strides that sportsbooks should study closely.

One area to examine is in the field of free-to-play (‘F2P’) mobile games. While mobile casinos have been quick to learn lessons from the fantastic success of titles like Candy Crush through gamification, sportsbooks haven’t yet adapted many of the innovations that have propelled the F2P mobile games industry into a global phenomenon.

F2P mobile games are incredibly effective at incentivising players to come back time and time again through time-delay based mechanics built into their games. Football management behemoth Top Eleven incorporates normal managerial duties with the added challenge of improving your team’s stadium, training pitches, youth sides and more. However, these are completed in real time, which gives the player a major incentive to continue returning back to the app to check on their status and play more games.

Although gamification may not work for mobile sportsbooks as well as it does for their casino brethren, these lessons could be applied in other ways. Instead of a one-off free bet promotion around a marquee sporting event, operators could perhaps look to set a timer where a punter gets a free bet 24 hours after their last bet. Operators would certainly see return-to-app rates improve.

FX trading, an equally competitive industry as betting and gaming, has recently seen an explosion of mobile innovations that mobile sportsbooks should take heed of.

Integrated into many of the top platforms are sentiment diagnostics, which tracks other traders’ positions in real time to ascertain the prevailing wind. Traders who want to trade sterling against the dollar can now see that, for example, 63% of their colleagues are selling the dollar, which helps to inform their decisions.

Taking that concept one giant leap further, our newly-launched app Pelican integrates full WhatsApp-style chat functionality into a premium trading app. Traders can now form groups of their friends and colleagues all over the world, discuss stocks, shares and markets, and trade in real time all in a single app.

Once in a group, unless disabled by the user, traders will be able to see every trade a colleague makes in real time and has the option to copy that trade, or directly challenge it by taking an opposing view in just one swipe of a finger. Any trade made also triggers a notification to be sent to group members, which increases app retention and return rates.

Betting chat

The implication of this new technology for mobile sportsbooks is enormous. Imagine a group of 20 friends in a single WhatsApp group that loves to argue about football. With the new technology integrated into a sportsbook’s app, they could all see each other’s bets in real time and challenge each other by betting on the opposite result.

Pelican’s beta testing and early launch phase results have shown that FX traders exchanged five group messages before making a trade, and logged back into the app to see what their mate’s trade nearly every time a notification landed on their phone.

Pelican has seen more engaged traders, in addition to higher return and retention rates since the launch of our app than was thought possible in the FX industry – what mobile sportsbook wouldn’t want that? Watch this space.