"DATA ANALYSIS IS FUNDAMENTAL TO GROWTH"

Iain Hutchison, CRO at Digitain, speaks to Gambling Insider about the supplier's iGaming platform Centrivo and payment system Paydrom

How does Centrivo differ from other gaming platforms?

Digitain has delivered full-service plug-in or turnkey sportsbook and platform solutions for 20 years. Due to that market knowledge, reliability and reputation, the brand is working with regulated top-tier operators in double-digit numbers worldwide. We know the importance of business processes, planning and the need to put the partner and their end player at the centre of everything we do. In the early days, technological solutions were rigid and inflexible to the needs of operators. For today’s operators, there is no point in designing technical solutions if they are fixed and rigid to the needs of our partners.

The result was our GLI-certified iGaming platform, Centrivo. It offers a user-friendly and streamlined platform for launching and managing an iGaming business. This means gaming operators can focus on delivering a high-quality gaming experience to their users rather than dealing with the complexities of setting up and managing a gaming platform. The platform fully supports multiple languages and currencies, which allows gaming operators to reach the widest audience possible and provide a more personalised experience for their players. This can unlock increased player engagement, acquisition, retention and revenue optimisation.

Centrivo is an omnichannel platform that the player can access via desktop, mobile and tablet devices. This allows gaming operators to reach players at any moment in the early acquisition marketing lifecycle – wherever they are – and provide a seamless gaming experience across various devices. Of course, data analysis is fundamental to growth opportunities; we again recognise that as a core business need, of which Centrivo includes a full reporting suite and player-focused automation, which can help gaming operators better understand their users. The marketing team can then optimise their players’ gaming experience, increasing user retention and loyalty. With this, the product teams conceptualised and designed a central and flexible platform that connects all aspects required to manage a gaming platform across multiple markets and territories.

What companies are currently using Centrivo, and who would you ideally like to partner with in the future?

Digitain serves many top-tier regulated operators in diverse markets, growing significantly with a strong pipeline demand in continental Europe. We recently opened our office in Bucharest, Romania, to meet this growing demand across regulated markets. This shall allow us to service that growing market and continue serving existing partners across the European time zone.

We plan to be up and running in London with a sales team in 2023 where we will only focus on regulated markets. From a partner perspective, we have and continue to have interest in tier-one operators looking to replace their incumbent technology stack with our solutions; or other operators looking to augment their product set within other local markets, which the current provider is perhaps less flexible in fulfilling.

What are the biggest challenges you have had to face with both Centrivo and Paydrom?

From a brand DNA, mindset and administrative team setup, we view everything as an opportunity to listen, learn and look toward finding a solution, but problems do arise and that’s where we flourish. If we consider challenges, most software-as-a-service (SAAS) businesses would consider or cite which programming languages to use or not, with the impact of having developers skilled to use that code base. Digitain has invested heavily in its people; we have internal training academies and growth labs that strategically review what could be used within the current stack. The key here is investing in people; great talent writes and delivers stable code and solutions, which applies to not only Centrivo and Paydrom and all touchpoints of our business.

What differentiates Paydrom from other payment method providers?

Payments are the lifeblood of any iGaming business, and can be viewed as a huge influencer in the product proposition to acquire and retain players to an operator’s brand. From the technology angle, multiple payment integrations can be a debilitating overhead to any integration’s roadmap with different flows, UIs and back-offices. We reviewed these structural challenges with the operator and player in mind, and created a solution architecture. The result is Paydrom, our unique solution that allows a centralised payment management system. With 50+ providers, 400+ payment options and over 30 countries covered, it streamlines the day-to-day operational payment flows.

The Paydrom UI has an easy-to-use interface to configure payment account details and store them securely. It supports multiple merchant accounts to diversify transaction traffic with enhanced transaction management functionality. With increasing CPA costs of acquiring new players with welcome bonuses, Paydrom has components to detect risk and fraud patterns; and machine learning-based velocity checks to mitigate promotional abuse and financial irregularities, reducing perhaps unwelcome player behavioural traits.

How is regulation impacting Paydrom across different jurisdictions?

Regulation is sometimes perceived as a limiting factor in determining and delivering services across the gaming ecosystem, and will continue to polarise opinion. Headwinds are increasing, perhaps as an overhang from the Covid-19 pandemic, when economies suffered, and consumption habits changed digitally and offline. However, while certain economies have started to recover, other complex global events have impinged. Therefore, governments, regulators and providers must collaborate to look at the data, facts and trends to develop consumer protection systems.

What more would you like to add to both Paydrom and Centrivo?

Consumers wish to be in control or have access to services that assist in their decision-making regarding household or discretionary consumer spending and that can only be a positive change. Our payment solution engineers are therefore very aware of these needs at the business level and, indeed, the consumer level, as they are also consumers themselves. On the Centrivo front-end, dynamic CMS at each touchpoint in the marketing funnel should become central to delivering not fully personalised experiences but more relevance and authenticity within the critical moments of the new players’ onboarding lifecycle.

What is the future for Paydrom and Centrivo?

Technology and new technology sets will always be front and centre of the development road map. However, we will see more changes driven by machine learning and predictive data analytics, to discover future revenue opportunities, optimisation, automation and efficiency out of today’s current business processes.