Building it in Africa, a Collaborative Approach

Rob Wheeler, Business Development Director at FSB says Africa is a land of opportunity and the rise of BetLion proves that operators can be successful in the region, but only if they are powered by the best technology.

Africa makes up 20% of the Earth’s total surface land area, it is the world’s second most populated continent after Asia. Its combined GDP is circa $1.515 Trillion, ranking it 11th in the World. These are eye catching stats, when you combine that with the Africans love of sport and how engaged they are with sport, it is little wonder that it is a big focus for sport betting operators and technology platform providers alike.

You can drill down to countries of specific interest, where the GDP is good, where the demographics of the country suit, how stable the individual economy is, the strength of mobile and internet coverage, and network infrastructure and prioritise your approach accordingly. However, shock, horror you won’t be the first to have done this. These markets are developing and maturing at pace, the operators are tech savvy as are the punters.

So the normal rules apply, the sports betting offer needs to be localised to the market place. The betting types the punter enjoys need to be readily available, the way they like to navigate the site needs to be familiar and the content easily accessible. As well as this the games mix needs to be correct, the mix of virtual sports content and casino games optimal and then there is the African twist.

There are specific challenges in Africa. For starters the operator will need a site that can run on a 2G/3G network, key considerations should be; what is the load time of my mobile site, what is the data consumption, are my games optimised to run on low bandwidth, what types of phone is my player audience using, can I provision my offer on a feature phone, how do my punters like to deposit and withdraw, have I got an offer where my punter can place cash with an agent or over the counter in a retail outlet or via a mobile phone payment service provider?

However, now the game has moved on even further, operators want to be able to differentiate. In the early days a sports betting offer that worked in the locality, addressing all the key questions above was enough, there was enough market to go round. Now operators are starting to look at their sportsbook technology providers in more depth.

The novel coronavirus Covid-19 pandemic took live sport away, when that happened operators saw first hand how their sports betting platform providers reacted. Did they support them and react fast by provisioning still-live sport like table tennis and Belarussian football and compliment that with a more expansive virtual sports and e-sports offer, or did they do nothing much at all?

Hopefully we are coming out of the other side of this crazy Covid-19 period but operators in Africa have not forgotten and they are looking more closely at their sports betting platform providers and asking the questions; how are they deriving their prices, do I have confidence in their technology as well as their trading and risk management, in the overall service they are providing me with, are they delivering new features in line with my requests, are they working with me so I have an offer that will help me build market share and compete with the market leaders?

FSB has been live in Africa since 2017; today we are live in Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Mozambique, Zambia, Tanzania and Nigeria. We work in close collaboration with our operator partners and are delighted to be able to announce that we have just signed a four year extension with BetLion, enabling us to can continue to build on the success we have had together to date. Please get in touch with me if you would like to find out more – rwheeler@fsbtech.com