Nowadays, the sports betting market has become more competitive than ever. Players are exposed to a countless number of online betting and information websites, as well as sports-specific information and price-comparison websites, making the situation more sophisticated and demanding than ever. Player loyalty has become an issue of growing concern for operators, since the easy access to multiple websites has led them to seek out the best offer, instead of remaining loyal to a particular brand. As a result, skills and methods for customer acquisition and customer retention are being seriously questioned and re-evaluated by operators.

This is a challenge that both suppliers and operators need to face and become more creative in their offerings and loyalty plans, so as to satisfy the new players’ needs and become the brand of choice for the new age consumers. Understanding and analyzing the patterns and habits of the customer is the key to building a sustainable business model. Technological innovation, multiple delivery channels, omni-channel approach, competitive odds, exciting content, and targeted, customized marketing strategies, all can contribute to operators’ commercial success.

Sports betting is a crucial vertical within the overall gaming offering of INTRALOT and our extensive experience in various jurisdictions has turned it into one of our competitive advantages. INTRALOT has developed a deep knowledge of both B2B and B2C regulated sports betting, leveraging from both sides of the business. We run localized business offering sports betting solutions supported by best-in-class technology deployed centrally and customized to the particular needs of the local jurisdictions where we operate.

Our Sports Betting offering is flexible, emphasizing on the reviewing and assessment of the entire local competitive marketplace and developing a product that is right for every jurisdiction. In parallel, it is our global expertise that brings to the various jurisdictions best practices and a businessproven technology that differentiates us with a unique, trend-driven offering, which fills the existing gaps of the market. After more than two decades of extensive experience as both a supplier and an operator we consider that localizing sports betting solutions for each customer, specific to their market needs and demands, is a winning strategy in sports betting.

The sports betting experience worldwide

INTRALOT’s expertise, originally perfected in lottery operations, has been applied to sports betting markets around the world to make INTRALOT a world leading regulated sports retail bookmaker, handling one of the world’s largest sports books. Our involvement in betting business environments has resulted in the development of sports betting on four different continents and more than 20 diverse markets, including two of the world’s largest state-licensed sports betting operations, namely OPAP’s
“Pame Stoixima” in Greece, and Spor Toto’s IDDAA in Turkey.

Commercial success follows our sports betting operations in various markets. An example of major operational and commercial success is Turkey, where IDDAA’s sports betting turnover has seen substantial growth as in 2014 tripling compared to its 2007 performance. “After the sports betting tender that we won in 2008, renewing our license to operate sports betting in Turkey, we had to continue achieving sustainable growth, to the benefit of our stakeholders and the local community. We achieved this by accepting an innovative culture that’s customer oriented, perceives our customer’s needs changing in time, and offers them the best gaming experience. As a result of our hard work since 2009, we put into practice 20 great innovations and projects that directly affected our business results. And in putting these special innovative ideas into practice in Turkey and Azerbaijan, INTRALOT played a unique role for developing new products, new services and technology, such as platforms and games that best fit the players’ needs and local market dynamics. And today, this innovative culture, and these dynamic and innovative business processes have become permanent, and continue to be successfully applied”, stated Ahmet Sezer, CEO of Inteltek.

In Morocco, the turnover is now four times bigger compared to 2010, when we undertook the responsibility of the operations. In Peru, the fixed odds betting game, Te Apuesto, has evolved to be the highest selling game among current portfolio of games and in less than four years grew to become and exemplary sports betting operation. In Taiwan, our betting product had a considerable commercial success, increasing significantly the sales from the first month of operations. The first year of operations sales grew by 60% in comparison with the previous operator. After the first six months of 2015 the forecast is an additional increase in sales of more than 20%.

In Italy, INTRALOT has established a strong brand in the highly competitive Italian gaming market, with a market share of more than 11% (in the retail sector) in 2014. It is necessary to highlight that among all major operators INTRALOT Italia is the only non-Italian company in the local market. Emilio Iaia, CEO of INTRALOT Holding and Services S.p.A., underlines: “Our success lies in our operational excellence that together with the advanced technology, enable us to provide the right mix between product and business proposal. INTRALOT Italia gives the maximum attention to the different territorial dynamics within the betting market, being aware that the requests from the network and the individual dealers are an effective means to understand the evolution of the gaming world before our peers. This allows us to adapt the technology and the right ‘time to market’ product to our advantage.”

iFLEX: the most flexible sports betting platform

INTRALOT has brought to the industry the most sophisticated technology, the iFLEX platform. INTRALOT’s iFLEX platform is a breakthrough, all inclusive, multi-channel, high performance sports betting platform that focuses on providing a full betting management solution in an easy-to-use environment.

The iFLEX advanced trading component provides a fully automated solution with all the necessary multi-channel real time information and tools. At INTRALOT we strive to provide an efficient environment to the operator, while at the same time offer a unique experience to each player. iFLEX has the unparalleled capability to run in high automation mode with only minimum human interaction where required. This feature allows operators to intervene only when real trading activities are needed and decisions on key risk management issues are essential. This capability of iFLEX makes it a unique working platform that utilizes human potential in an effective and efficient fashion. INTRALOT’s iFLEX platform implements our expert know-how in order to enable operators to deal with the modern challenges existing in the betting industry and, in turn, offer to the end player a fully personalized, unique and entertaining game experience.

On October 20, the leading gaming company of Jamaica, Supreme Ventures Limited (SVL) launched INTRALOT’s new technology platform, iFLEX. Brian George, SVL President and CEO, described the technology as a huge jump in betting options and commented: “The iFLEX betting platform project is an innovative, robust and highperformance betting solution that meets the growing demands of the international gaming industry. It is an excellent business-tobusiness and business-to-consumer platform
that supports both the current retail and future Internet channels, allowing customers to move beyond the compromises of the current generation of betting technology.”

Universal Gaming Experience for the player

The retailer is a key factor in the success stories of INTRALOT’s sports betting operations and technology is a factor of great importance in reaching out and enticing new players. INTRALOT has devised methods and technologies that implement efficient synergies and reward schemes towards the retailers from player activity that takes place remotely on interactive and mobile channels. This proved to be a very efficient mechanism to further increase the revenues enjoyed by the retail network. Player cards, loyalty schemes, and player lifetime rewards are simple examples of the holistic strategy of bringing the retail and remote channels together into a Universal Gaming Experience for the player and enhanced revenues to agents.

From a player perspective, INTRALOT’s developed technologies offer shared login and authentication, shared wallet, and a uniform depositing system across all platforms. All of these allow the players to make use of their deposited funds and play whenever and wherever they are. iFLEX offers an exciting and fully encompassing experience to the players.

Understanding the player

Market assessment is a continuous process for INTRALOT constantly seeking to offer the most appealing products driven by players’ behavior and preferences. Within a competitive market our non-static sports betting offering is the result of a deep understanding of the current trends and betting patterns after a thorough evaluation of each market, with the aim to maximize the commercial success of an operation. To this end INTRALOT has invested in a player account and relationship management
system that meets the growing demands of the gaming industry. It enables the expansion of sales and services across all virtual sales channels and product verticals.

The platform is fully integrated with the Interactive Gaming Console, which provides personalized user experience in relation to each player’s access channel. CRM is about understanding and connecting with the customer. Knowing and investing in your customer is the key to building a sustainable business and to optimizing the long-term value of the player base. Omnichannel player management is key to all operators that wish to offer the best customer experience.

CRM is the cornerstone for any business that aspires to be customer-centric. Our platform improves as it learns from previous behaviors of the customers, synthesizing at the same time countless data points into concrete correlations that truly feed the whole process to delivering more value to the customer. In the end, what matters is not about the data, but the delivery of genuine value to the customer. Capturing the data is the easy part. Our platform has unique capabilities that convert the data into meaningful intelligence that drives business decisions and applies high levels of innovation and flexibility and marketing tools developed in competitive online gaming environments. How we design, package, market, and deliver our sports betting solution to the players, are all driven by data analytics, which is the brain of our high-performing CRM system.

Sports betting through multiple channels

Leveraging the demographic changes and with a deep understanding of the millennials’ preferences and habits, aiming to meet their needs for more social interaction, we have embraced an omni-channel distribution strategy for a seamless gaming experience. To this end we have developed and are now offering to players in many jurisdictions across geographies exciting sports betting products through dedicated, technologically advanced, intuitive and user-friendly websites. The games are deployed on INTRALOT’s platform fully complying with the international security and responsible gaming standards. We have also created an unparalleled mobile experience supported by our mobile product offering; a lottery native app, which is a fully blown mobile platform enabling operators to offer a complete game experience on mobile devices and exciting content, strengthen their product offerings and extend their player base.