GMB - What is your assessment of Genius Sports's performance and growth in 2022? Was it what you expected or did it exceed expectations?
Guilherme Buso - Genius Sports delivered an excellent financial result in the first three quarters of the 2022 fiscal year, maintaining its commitment to all the company's stakeholders. We continue to invest and implement innovative technology, win new customers and strengthen our key relationships in sports, betting and media.
Our authoritative global data relationships with relevant sports leagues and federations around the world allow us to deliver reliable, unique and difference-making products to bookmakers and media partners around the world.
Could you list the main accomplishments or goals achieved?
It was an important year for our operation in Latin America and, mainly, in Brazil. On the side of sports relations, we have grown our relationship with the CBV (Brazilian Volleyball Confederation) with an exclusive data and streaming contract for the Brazilian Beach Volleyball Circuit, in addition to delivering new video check kits for the Superliga. We added new basketball agreements, such as Streetopia, a new and modern basketball league in Brazil, in addition to renewing numerous exclusive partnerships with federations throughout Latin America.
In football, in addition to the global agreements we have with major federations in the region, such as Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Liga MX, in 2022 we signed the first Second Spectrum agreement directly with a club, Necaxa, from Mexico.
On the side of bookmakers, we also had a relevant year with the announcement of an extremely important agreement with Betsul, in April, in addition to other B2B and B2C partnerships and renewals with bookmakers and platforms not only in Brazil, but throughout Latin America.
In your sector within the industry, what topics or technological advances do you think will dominate the market in 2023? What will be the future trends?
I believe that customization and focus on the user/fan experience continues to be a major trend in the market. For this reason, Genius Sports has been working on global agreements with the main leagues in the world through Second Spectrum technology, which allows precise tracking of athletes on the field combined with the transmission of games with augmented reality. This is already happening in the Premier League, NFL, NBA and MLS, and in 2022 we closed our first agreement in Latin America, with Necaxa (Mexico).
In addition, Genius Sports also offers operators "Free-to-Play" gaming solutions that also allow for very high interaction with users through gamified engagement tools to add value to sports betting, which is obviously the real deal.
Have you noticed that the Brazilian gaming market has evolved this year, or has it missed another opportunity? What do you see about the regulation in the country for 2023?
Brazil is still an evolving market. Regulation could have boosted the growth of this ecosystem, but with the imminent legislation, I see that bookmakers and platforms are more focused and concerned with data integrity and with more sophisticated solutions and products to meet this new demand from Brazilian users, that grows exponentially.
This is a huge opportunity for us, as over the past 20 years, Genius Sports has built a strong reputation as a global industry leader in providing the highest quality sports betting products. In particular, our football products are recognized by operators worldwide for the quality, speed and reliability of our data, in addition to our concern for the integrity of the entire ecosystem.
I even believe that data integrity is an important point for regulation in the country and our focus of action in Brazil in 2023 aims to be side by side with operators and sports entities contributing to this issue with our technology and expertise.
What are Genius Sports’ main goals/objectives for 2023?
2023 will be a very important year for Genius Sports in Brazil. We will continue our work of growing and expanding our partnerships, exploring our main Pre-Match, In-Play, Game Trackers and Streaming products, but also expanding our portfolio with the new MultiBet, launched now for the World Cup, GTS (Genius Trading Services), which allows operators greater control of their operations, in addition to our market-leading media solutions (programmatic, F2P, etc.).
We have strong relationships with the main sports organizations in Brazil, such as the NBB, CBV, Liga Nacional de Futsal, local federations, in addition to partnerships in Latin America and the world, which allows us to provide exclusive and extremely relevant content for the country. We believe that these sports partnerships also position us as an important player to contribute to the integrity of this rapidly expanding and evolving market, and we are focused on developing new businesses here in Brazil.
Source: Exclusive GMB
