Games Magazine Brasil - What assessment do you make of your company's performance and growth in 2023 overall? Did it meet expectations or exceed them?
Camilo Millon - The last 12 months have further cemented Kambi’s position as the sportsbook provider of choice for visionary operators all over the globe.
We were pleased to agree new partnerships with a range of tier one operators including Bally’s, Svenska Spel and LiveScore Group, alongside a series of land-based partnerships with organisations including Potawatomi Casino Hotel, WarHorse Gaming and Prairie Band Casino & Resort. Alongside this, we have complemented new signings by renewing long-term agreements with many existing partners such as ATG, Colombian market leader BetPlay, LeoVegas and Rush Street Interactive, underlining the strength of Kambi’s long-term trajectory.
The commercial progress we are making is underpinned by extensive enhancements made to core elements of our sportsbook. This included debuting cash out and in-game functionality for our award-winning Bet Builder product ahead of Super Bowl LVII, while our AI-trading division, which has processed hundreds of millions of bets to date, became Tzeract, signalling the next stage in the evolution of Kambi’s trading and bet creation capabilities.
What assessment do you make of your company's performance and growth within the Brazilian market in 2023?
We were pleased to note the Senate’s approval of sports betting regulation, and Kambi is well placed to capitalise as and when a regulatory framework for sports betting is enacted. By way of example, Rei do Pitaco, the country’s largest Daily Fantasy Sports operator will leverage Kambi’s technology to expand into sports betting. With millions of downloads for its DFS app and backed by FanDuel co-founder Nigel Eccles, who also serves as the Chair of RDP, the operator has the expertise and brand recognition to capture extensive market share.
Further to this, Kambi partners including Bally’s have ambitious plans to drive growth in Brazil’s sports betting market, and Kambi’s deep offering across hugely popular sports in the country including football, tennis, and basketball, as well as MMA and Formula One gives us the ideal platform to empower their growth strategies.
For Kambi, commercial success is not solely defined in signing new partners and supporting existing ones, but also making sure that we are capable of launching them in new markets rapidly and in compliance with all local requirements. No operator wants to be in a position of delaying market entry or being forced to withdraw from a market due to compliance requirements their tech-stack is incapable of reconciling, and the expertise of our compliance and technical teams means that with Kambi this is never the case.
Could you list the main achievements or goals accomplished? (This could include product/service launches, successful products/services, international expansion, awards received, financial results, etc.)
From a commercial perspective it was a year marked by several significant new signings for Kambi’s Complete sportsbook solution. Signing with Svenska Spel following a highly competitive bid process was an important moment, partnering Kambi with one of the most prominent sports betting brands in Sweden. Alongside our landmark agreement with LiveScore Group, we have signed partnerships with two operators with well established brands and large customer databases, and ambitious plans to drive further growth leveraging Kambi’s sports betting technology.
A factor worth emphasising is that the partnership with Svenska Spel includes provision for Kambi Group company Shape Games to supply its leading, fully-native front end technology to the operator. Having agreed to supply its services to SunBet in November, the appeal and synergy of the Kambi-Shape combination to both new and existing Kambi partners is evident.
We have also continued to evolve our offering, delivering meaningful enhancements to our bet builder product, alongside the launch of or our AI-powered trading division Tzeract.
In addition to Kambi’s cutting-edge sportsbook, Kambi Group also offers market-leading UX and UI capabilities powered by front-end specialists Shape Games, and is also a global leader in the provision of esports data and odds with Abios. The progress being made both unilaterally and as part of the Kambi platform by Abios in esports data and odds provision, and Shape Games with its market-leading front-end technology, underlines the commercial rationale behind our modularisation strategy, and Tzeract fits seamlessly alongside them as part of the wider Kambi Group.
In your sector within the industry, what trends or technological advances do you believe will dominate the market in 2024?
The role that artificial intelligence and automation have to play in advancing the sports betting industry should not be understated.
Player behaviour is moving towards the products and bet offers that only complex algorithms have the capacity to deliver, and the growing richness and complexity of data increasingly requires AI to help interpret and trade these products correctly.
To that end, Kambi launched our aforementioned AI-powered trading division in 2022, which became ‘Tzeract’ in November 2023. Tzeract enables Kambi to set a new standard for bet creation with a complete overhaul of the conventional, static bet offer list model which can struggle to keep pace with the shift towards end user curated markets.
Having already processed hundreds of millions of bets since launch, it is a comprehensive AI platform capable of odds compiling, trading and risk management across the full offering, and has the capacity to be truly revolutionary in how it expands both the scope of the products we can create, as well as how they are packaged for the end user – providing limitless opportunities for innovation and the building of bespoke products as we move away from the rigid and traditional monolithic bet offer platform.
What is your general opinion on the regulation of the sports betting and online gaming market that is on the verge of approval in Congress?
With approximately 95% of revenue derived from locally regulated markets, Kambi always welcomes the passage of regulation. The potential of Brazil to become one of the largest regulated markets for sports betting in the world is well known, and we look forward to playing an important role in helping to realise that potential with new and existing partners.
What are the main goals/objectives of your company for 2024 within the Brazilian market? And on a global scale?
As the trusted provider to operators on six continents Kambi maintains a global outlook and strategic focus on markets all over the world, and continuing to grow our reach throughout Brazil and Latin America is a key pillar of our strategy. Having powered BetPlay to achieve a position of market leadership in Colombia, we are also live with operators such as BetWarrior, Olimpo.bet and Rush Street Interactive in markets including Argentina, Mexico and Peru, and it is from this position of strength that we will continue to expand our footprint throughout Latin America.
Source: Exclusive GMB
