Smarkets CEO Jason Trost is hoping to carve out more business for his betting exchange by keeping its commission charges low. In an interview with February’s edition of Betting Business interactive, Trost said that sports betting customers will continue to become more informed and more demanding, meaning that the value offered by companies will be crucial towards success.
He explained: “Value is key in this industry and we want to continue to be the leader in this regard. Right now our competitors are increasing their flat commissions, upping rates based on location and hindering winning customers with premium charges. We’re deliberately going the opposite direction, investigating innovative technology and business models with the hope of not just maintaining our 2 per cent rate, but actually lowering it too!”
He also said that this helped word of mouth marketing: “We’re not reliant on marketing gimmicks to differentiate ourselves. We are growing organically very well simply because we offer the best prices in the industry. If we needed a huge marketing budget to sell Smarkets to our demographic, that would suggest our product isn’t good enough in the first place.”
He also said that the point of consumption tax didn’t have major repercussions for Smarkets, and might actually provide some opportunity. “The introduction of Point of Consumption was a huge change in the UK gambling industry. However, as a company we are very nimble and as a result we saw very little change to our business operations. More importantly, this shift in practices had no effect on our prices, offering or service to our customers. With that being said, we have recently seen some competitors depart from the UK market following this legislative transition and this is obviously a considerable advantage for us to capitalise upon.”