The importance of delivering partners and players with a mammoth range of options and a choice of culturally relevant betting opportunities has never been greater, according to BetConstruct's Head of Sportsbook and Trading Operations, Matt Howard.
Matt, who has 15-years experience in the industry and leads a team of 250 traders, was speaking on the eve of BetConstruct's latest launch, the company's Asia View Sportsbook which was unveiled at May's G2E Asia show which was held in Macau.
Explaining the thinking behind the development he said: "Ensuring that the products we offer are customised in order to be culturally relevant is an essential part of the service we provide and an important manifestation of our growing presence and reputation on the international stage. Our research and knowledge of the market confirmed that Asian players demand more in terms of a uniform layout of markets, more frequent updates for 'in-running' betting particularly for soccer."
The BetConstruct thinking is based on making players feel at home in what is an intensely competitive market, as Matt Howard explained: "If it's a familiar environment, players will feel more comfortable, the customer experience will be enhanced and they will continue to come back in what is otherwise a promiscuous market. Customising products to enhance the levels of player retention is a much more preferable and commercially sensible strategy than constantly having to recruit players."
Player recruitment and then retention is the driver for BetConstruct's investment in being able to offer players an industry best choice of 20,000 live matches a month to bet on. "As is the case with all consumer markets, choice is everything and if there's a market for the Finnish bat and ball sport, Pesapallo, which as well as Finland has significant followings in Germany, Sweden, Australia and parts of Canada – then we will answer that need " confirmed Howard.
"The concept of choice doesn't just apply to non-mainstream sports, it's also about being able to provide odds feeds courtesy of BetConstruct's burgeoning network of scouts. We currently have a team of 500 scouts who provide live feeds from games. We provide these at the request of our partners and if the request is to cover soccer in the Slovakian 2nd Division then that's what we do. It's all about our partners and satisfying the needs of their customers."
According to Matt, the big challenges and therefore the big opportunities come from the way in which developers are able to harness and deploy advances in technology. He said: "Cash Out has been a big deal for the sports betting sector and live betting is the driver, enabled of course by advances in technology. The interest is in quick markets such as tennis where bets on the next point for example, can be made, paid and settled in minutes if not seconds."
He added: "The great thing for our partners is that we can run everything from a single source and thanks to our agility we've been able to get start-ups trading extremely quickly and in some best case scenarios, within one month".
