Q&A: Robin Reed, CEO, Gaming Innovation Group
Reed talks to eGaming Review about the development of GiG's in-house gaming platform and the company's blueprint for future B2C success
It could be argued that few companies in the online gambling sector have had a year as transformative as Gaming Innovation Group (GiG).
In 2015 the ï¬rm listed on the Oslo stock exchange, appointed a new CEO in Robin Reed, changed its company name (formerly Nio), completed various acquisitions and successful product launches, and also found the time to roll out a new in-house cloud-based gaming platform.
It’s a strategy that seems to be working. The egaming ï¬rm recently reported its ï¬rst quarterly proï¬t under the new corporate entity and, based on its current strength and future potential, was rewarded with its ï¬rst appearance in this magazine’s prestigious Power 50 list in 43rd place.
Before the end of the year, GiG is planning to launch its ï¬rst online poker product in partnership with Microgaming, in addition to unveiling a new multi-vertical brand – Rizk. com – on the operator’s proprietary iGaming Cloud (iGC) platform.
This piece of technology, according to Reed, forms a key part of its future strategy to expand into a ï¬exible multi-vertical, multi-brand operator. To ï¬nd out more, eGaming Review spoke with the chief exec about the new platform and how he’s positioning GiG for future growth.
eGaming Review (eGR): What have been some of the key developments for GiG during 2015?
Robin Reed (RR): We worked hard for quite a while building our cloud-based platform service – iGaming Cloud (iGC) – which we think has the potential to be disruptive. To see that go live with the ï¬rst operator was pretty exciting and so was the reception in the market. In September, iGC also completed an in-house sportsbook service, which launched on Guts.com, as well as signing our ï¬ rst external customer.
Our operating arm beneï¬ted greatly from iGC and the number of active players increased 85% year-on-year in Q3. Shipping a new sportsbook front-end for both desktop, tablet and mobile allowed us to become possibly the largest egaming advertiser on TV in Norway and to hear people talking about the brand on the bus is quite weird, but very fun.
eGR: Are you still predominantly focused on the Nordic markets? How are your revenues split per market?
RR: We’ve not disclosed these ï¬gures to the market yet and can’t comment on this in too much detail. However, our largest single market for the B2C arm is actually not in the Nordics but as a combined region it’s certainly our largest.
As for the B2B business, our geographical footprint should extend to a diverse mix of markets over the next few months. Our performance marketing arm is primarily Nordic where I believe we are becoming one of the largest sources of paying users to the online casino industry.
eGR: Are you keeping a close eye on regulatory developments in Scandinavia?
RR: Most certainly and we are also contributing to the process. Regulated markets hold the key for us, as evidenced by the conservative stand of our operator arm and, for instance, the recent signing of www.11.lv which is one of three locally licensed companies in Latvia. We have obtained a licence in the UK this year and have decided to add further local licences next year.
eGR: What markets are you looking to expand into in the future?
RR: We’ve seen good value coming from UK traï¬c in our B2C arm and while we are still a very small player in that market it is inspirational for our platform. Therefore we are looking to power more established players with our platform and we will seek a licence in Denmark to enable B2B clients to operate there.
eGR: How is Guts.com performing with the new sportsbook product?
RR: We’ve always had great plans for sports betting and the domain Guts.com was actually chosen with sports betting in mind. One of the founders of Guts, Anders Berntsen, had previously been a founder at Betsafe where he built and managed the sportsbook and its team.
However the product was initially launched as a casino and had grown signiï¬cantly by the time we added a fully managed sportsbook some six months later. There were some constraints to this setup, which limited what we could do but through this experience we also identiï¬ed a gap in the B2B oï¬ering on the market and a certain type of business.
We therefore took the hard road and started building our proprietary sportsbook in iGC. Those eï¬orts came to fruition with the launch on Guts.com in September and since then we are seeing growth in sports on Guts and an onset of interest from potential B2B clients.
eGR: When will Rizk.com launch and how will it be different from Guts.com?
RR: Rizk is all about enhancing he joy of egaming. It is our journey into gamiï¬cation and big data, enabled by iGaming Cloud. As such it is a showcase of the capability of the platform.
Automatic crediting of a vast amount of reward types, allowed us to do event-based triggering and also enabled the end user to save the reward and trigger when he wants to activate it. It really opened up a new world for us in terms of the emotional customer journey.
We have a prototype ready and although we really believe in the MVP approach to products, we have decided to continue working on it and will probably launch within the next couple of months.
eGR: What are the main advantages of your in-house cloud- based platform?
RR: The vision of iGaming Cloud is to make the egaming industry lean and connected, and it is derived from all of our pain and experience in getting innovative things done in a timely and cost-eï¬cient manner. It is a client management platform developed in-house from the ï¬rst line of code.
We are saving every thinkable data point left by the end-users and we have developed the tools you need to manage them and your online casino or sports betting business. We are seeing iGaming Cloud as a vendor-neutral marketplace between application developers and a client ecosystem.
A service provider gets one integration point to access a client eco-system, who again gets one integration point to access all service providers such as game vendors, payment providers, aï¬liate systems, CRM software, easy payment gateway and so forth.