Q&A: Ben Kamara, head of mobile, Sky Bet
Sky Bet's head of mobile talks to eGR about its mobile-first approach and the release of its latest app updates
eGaming Review (eGR): Sky Bet is often seen as having a mobile-first mentality. Why did you take this approach?
Ben Kamara (BK): When we launched the mobile service in 2011 we quickly saw that the percentage of our users coming through on mobile as opposed to desktop was rising. And it wasn’t just cannibalisation, there was also growth to the point whereby in early 2012 we pretty much hit the 50/50 mark which we could see only going one way. We then started to identify what we needed to do going forward and built upon this mobile-first approach.
All the time the product was evolving and we were adding new things, such as scoreboards for live events, imagery on the homepage, coupon functionality and adding coupons across different sports other than just football. The final big jump for us was when we launched version 3.0 of the Sky Bet app when we drained all the customers off the old Mobenga service so that 100% of all our traffic was in-house. We’re now at the point where the mobile service from Sky Bet and Sky Vegas are both in-house with pretty much identical codes and systems.
eGR: You recently released version 3.2 of the Sky Bet app which includes seamless login between Sky Bet and Sky Vegas. How long had this been in the pipeline for and are there plans to roll it out across other verticals?
BK: That was something we had been talking about for a long time. With the new in-house Sky Bet service, we wanted to do all the great things we did on desktop on the mobile site. The fact that on the desktop you can just click between the tabs and go to the other services when you want to, that was a key area we wanted to look into and identified very early on. But until Sky Bet was in-house and on the same platform as Sky Vegas it wasn’t possible.
We’re now at the point where it is. As well as the seamless login to Sky Vegas, it stretches beyond that to include Super Six and Fantasy Football. Although we have challenges within the business to do it for Bingo because it’s an app provided by Virtue Fusion. However, if and when we get round to doing a poker solution for mobile, it would also immediately work for that.
eGR: Do you have any definite plans to launch a mobile poker offering?
BK: We will at some point, we’ve just got other things we need to be doing with our desktop product first. I can’t say for sure whether it will happen this financial year or this calendar year.
eGR: You’ve spoken previously about trying to differentiate your tablet and mobile offering. Could you tell us a bit more about that?
BK: Currently there is little difference but we know that there are more users than ever on tablet and it’s very much part of what people’s home lifestyle is now. We’ve talked about it internally for a long time and we know it’s something that we aim to really differentiate in the next six months. We haven’t actually kicked anything off yet, this period has been more about dealing with the start of season, getting these app updates out and taking the best advantage of our platform as it currently is now.
eGR: So are you planning on rolling out something different within the next six months?
BK: I would say so. How different it is and whether it will be considered industry changing I can’t really say. But we will certainly be looking at this over the next six months with the intention of giving our tablet users a better experience than they’re getting now.