SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
In an exclusive interview OpenBet Chief Executive Officer Jeremy Thompson-Hill reveals how he has been working hard to change the firm’s logic and mechanisms to be more customer-centric than focused on IT structures. As igaming consumers become more demanding and selective in their choices, SBC’s Managing Director Andrew McCarron finds out how Thompson-Hill has implemented strategic change at OpenBet.
SBC: It’s approaching two years since you took the CEO job at OpenBet. What were the major challenges you faced in that time?
JTH: I took over during a period of change. We had enjoyed rapid and continuous success, but for the first time things had started to slow down. We had slipped back for the first time in our history that year for a number of reasons. It had been a difficult time for the market and operators were weighing up their next moves as there was no longer the continuous drive to throw as much product out there as possible.
I often think that our business simply mirrors what our customer’s business is, albeit from a different side. So when they hit challenges, they become our challenges and vice versa. The market was subdued and we had some stiff targets that couldn’t be met in that environment. We also had to invest in the organisation itself, to invest in the platform to ensure we kept our position at the front of the market. During that time a number of new platforms had sprung up and new business was getting tougher and tougher for a company like OpenBet that strictly works in regulated markets.
The combination of all that meant it was a harder time for the company over an 18-month period, and I took over around halfway through that. We have worked hard and returned to double-digit growth and invested in our product suite to deliver market leading innovations.
SBC: So how did you go about that?
JTH: From a product perspective if you want to bring about considerable change there are two ways to do it. One is to spend massive amounts of money and go for a big re-architecture, bite the bullet and maybe hire 100 people. The other way is to do it incrementally where you choose the parts of the system in need of improvement or change and use smaller tactical units delivering those specifically to customers in the first instance and then move the system on slowly over time. We changed the strategy from the former to the latter and focused the resources on what customers wanted day to day. Instead of telling them ‘No, we’re building something over here’ we listened to what they wanted and tried to give it to them as quickly and efficiently as possible.
SBC: Did the modular nature of the OpenBet system lend itself to this approach anyway?
JTH: Because we are a very open platform, the architecture should lend itself to those types of incremental changes. It certainly helped, but it needed a much, much deeper consideration of what the platform should be in five years going forward. Looking back, we took quite a limited view of what we thought our customers wanted. We focused on architectural IT rather than product and a player-centric approach. That fundamentally is one of those cultural changes we needed to make. It’s very easy for software suppliers of our size to start scurrying away building stuff at great expense without really understanding exactly what the market wants. In our hearts we are engineers who supply gaming services. We’re not operators.
As soon as we made that cultural shift, within a year our EBITDA figures had grown by 30 percent. And that growth continued with FY14 being 11.3% up on the previous year.
SBC: What does this approach mean in practical terms then?
JTH: Customers need to be able to do things on their own system and they need the flexibility and freedom, because there are always elements that they need to control. It’s mainly about customers doing things in the front-end space, about them owning their shop window. The look and feel is the customer’s IP. For us it is about what is perceived as the less exciting developments that goes on behind the scenes. However, the most polished portal in the world won’t deliver if it isn’t built on firm foundations. One thing I’ve learnt is that our customers do the front-end better than any supplier, which can be painful to admit.
Sky Bet took its front end in-house and it has worked fantastically well. They can make changes without involving OpenBet, they don’t then invoke additional costs and they’ve got complete freedom. OpenBet shouldn’t be in their front window trying to dress the mannequins. It’s not our expertise. Our expertise is how you build complex performance products or how do you run in-running markets with 30,000 changes in a game and make it run smoothly and robustly. We have focused on what we do well. It might sound obvious but it is often easy to get distracted by the bright lights.
SBC: How do you think the market has evolved since you took over?
JTH: It’s night and day now to what it was between 2009-2012. Online and mobile have changed the way bookmakers interact with customers and the way they interact with betting. However, in other ways it is still the same. It is – and always will be – all about the punter. Since taking over, the one thing I would say is that retail has been seen in the last few years as the poor relation to online betting. It still accounts for c.50% of most of our customers’ revenue, with the obvious exceptions of those which are online-only. The concept of convergence and multi-channel has been flying around and I think what the real change is that the market is ready to adopt a more customer focused approach and is ready for a seamless one player, one account solution. It is like Sky+: before you knew what it was capable of you were sceptical, one you have tried it you can’t live without it. A true omni-channel gaming solution is no different. With the arrival of point of consumption tax it is more important than ever to justify spend both on marketing and technology and to know your players We are well placed to help our customers deliver in what will only be a tougher market.
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Jeremy Thompson-Hill – CEO – OpenBet
