Yahale Meltzer

Meltzer: The rise of the aggregator

GrooveGaming Founder and COO Yahale Meltzer discusses how the aggregator is staying focused in this hugely competitive industry

WHAT IS GROOVEGAMING DOING TO STAY AHEAD OF THE COMPETITION? GrooveOne, our backend, gives you a casino in a box and all the tools that are required to run a successful operation, marketing, tournaments, promotions, free spins, business intelligence, game management, game portfolios, top games recommendations and business insights, amongst others. It’s accessible, easy to understand and gives all the back-office and capability an operator would ever need. We are more and more focused on simpler, better, quicker across a lot of different tools. Better UI, better user experience, better customer journey and more entertainment power for the market.

By making the right changes, by tweaking the features and tools within GrooveOne, operators are able to take full advantage of a very large database. And that, in a word, is our mantra; customisation. Effortless customisation that requires no technical knowledge in the operator, as we have one of the strongest technical teams in the industry to do that for you. We work hard so that the operator is able to focus on other parts of the business; as they are confident that having integrated with us they have all the content they will ever need.

And we are adding a volume of new games every week to make sure they feel on top of it. Plus we are constantly matching games to their target markets. Many operators are growing because they are integrated with us by building game portfolios for best performance, based on entertainment and financial value.

HAVE YOU NOTICED A CHANGE IN DEMAND FROM OPERATORS AND CASINOS THROUGHOUT THE PANDEMIC? The pandemic signalled the rise of the aggregator. Operators were looking for new content as they lost sportsbooks and studios that delivered live content. Demand grew during the pandemic, and we also saw new trends and shifts. In some instances, new categories appeared, such as ‘Real Casino’ and blockchain-based games, which were a reaction to the sudden halt in real world gambling activities. If you are connected to an aggregator it’s easy to switch between game suppliers. We have 10 live dealers, for example, so it’s easy for an operator to switch between say India, Estonia or Costa Rica via Groove. You just switch it on. We saw a spike, especially in Asia, on live dealer. Virtual sports also became popular.

Providing an umbrella of solutions – and we are very much a solutions-driven business – was key to survival for those who had lost large parts of their business. Studios were closed, there were no live sports, so we didn’t really sleep for weeks responding to the need for viable content alternatives for our clients. There was new traffic and new opportunities. Operators were looking everywhere for new business and we had to get the products they needed to be competitive. Video bingo for Brazil is one that sticks with me as a notable deliverable. With these massive shifts in markets, the entire Groove team had to very rapidly support opportunities operators found around the world.

YOU WERE FOUNDED FIVE YEARS AGO. WHAT ARE THE COMPANY’S AIMS IN THE NEXT FIVE YEARS? To get the kind of accelerated growth we have been able to achieve, at Groove we make a one-year plan, a three-year plan and a five-year plan, and these plans remain very flexible, as we adapt to new technologies quickly and effectively. With the rapid shifts happening in the iGaming industry, our five-year plan will change in two years.

That said, we envisage that everything will be clickable and that part of the service operators will enjoy is to be a click away from everything: changing content, changing layouts, changing marketing; and that everything will be simple and quick to use through our website.

Every point of contact will be easy and intelligent. We see everything clickable moving forward. We see the need to become more innovative as a company. Putting innovation as a key enabler of the business, automated customisation is the end goal; providing localised content and adapted to regulation. The big-data component of this should not be underestimated and we have already started implementing artificial intelligence to help clients automatically.

We also cannot forget that each player deserves a unique experience, the best fun, the highest quality entertainment. The more we are able to do that, the more casinos will profit. For Groove it’s been about shaping the industry in our field; and we envisage continuing to do that over the next five years.