GAMING AMERICA | GAMBIT REWARDS
HIGH-OCTANE LOYALTY We spoke with Richard Pistilli, Founder and CEO of Gambit Rewards, following its acquisition by Snipp Interactive, to discuss the company’s creative take on loyalty rewards and how this approach can impact the gaming industry. Firstly, would you be able to tell our readers about your personal and career history? I am the Founder and CEO of Gambit Rewards; I have over 20 years of capital markets experience, spending over a decade as an investment banker in New York before launching several fintech start-up ventures. When I was an investment banker I covered a number of different industries and, as you can imagine, one of these was the loyalty sector: the loyalty and rewards space. This is where my background lies when it comes to building Gambit Rewards. Gambit Rewards was started back in 2018, and the opportunity my partners 58 | GAMINGAMERICA
and I saw was to create a convergence between two market trends; one of which was online sports betting and gaming in America, and the other being the loyalty space. We were thinking about these two big bubbles. In the loyalty space, the industry has grown to the point where it’s effectively ubiquitous. You as a consumer have essentially grown to the point where you have come to expect loyalty features in every corner of your consumer experience. The challenge is that the experience itself has become pretty standardized. You offer the consumer free flights, free nights or gift cards, right? Anywhere you go you get the same thing. So, we looked at this huge industry,
with $100bn worth of loyalty points outstanding in the United States alone and asked how we differentiate; because the industry is in need of innovation. On the other side, you look at the gaming sector, which for so long in the US has been prohibited and restricted but is now opening up. We said there is this huge audience, which is currently sitting on a huge amount of assets separate from their cash (their loyalty/rewards points) that they could be doing something with. And then there is this gaming experience: fast forward to 2022 online sports betting has completely transformed. It's mainstream, going from legalization to state adoption, to major media companies diving in and
