GMB - How has BiS SiGMA been for Alea?
Alexandre Tomic - It's been going really well, thank you for being here. The show is impressive. I wasn't here last year, the folks from Alea were, but we didn't have a booth. Now we're all here. It's a very impressive show, there are a lot of people. You can tell that Brazil is the focus of several iGaming companies. It's really worth it. We’ve been at SBC, in Rio de Janeiro, two months ago. It was a good event, very good, but a bit smaller. Here it's different, you can tell it's quite bigger.
Do people look for Alea a lot? How did the alliances you have formed turn out?
Yes, the good thing was that on the first night we won the award for Best Aggregator in Latin America. Which is true, we are the first aggregator in LatAm and Brazil to do more business in this market. So, we are very pleased that the industry and SiGMA recognized that. For us, the show started fantastically, tremendously. A lot of people came here, many clients, and very positive feedback.
This is living proof of Alea's success here in Brazil. What can you tell us about the partnerships you've made with Caleta and others in Brazil?
Exactly, we have Amigo Gaming, Caleta Gaming, Tara Gaming, which are three very important providers for us overall, but especially for the Latin American market. We made an exclusive and strategic partnership with Comtrade Gaming, a platform with big clients that has been around for 20 years and recently launched 10 games, 8 slots and 2 crash games, one of which is about football. We are the exclusive distributor of these games in Latin America.
So, this is a super important partnership. We just did an interview with Steve Valentine, who is the CCO of Comtrade, and this partnership is very strategic for us. We see such big companies wanting to work with us, recognizing that we are a very important and indispensable player in the LatAm market.
Is Brazil the main market, the main focus for Alea at the moment?
I can't say that because we have other markets in Latin America that are quite big, but we can say that Brazil is really one of the top ones. It caught us (as everyone) by surprise. I started in the gaming business 20 years ago in 2004, with a casino called Solera Casino. There was Argentina and Brazil, but we could never do anything because there were no payment methods, there was no online market, only land-based had appeared a year, a year and a half ago.
It's quite new and every year since 2004 I've heard: "Patience, next year is the year of Brazil, it will be the year of Latin America, it will be golden," and in the end I forgot, like the year of mobile, which was in 2012. As you see, I started in 2004, and finally 2024 is the year of LatAm and Brazil. It took 20 years for iGaming to finally reach Latin America and Brazil.
Alea is not only the best aggregator, but also the best place to work, because there is a well-being program that takes care of your employees. Can you tell us more about it?
Yes, we've received several awards, two or three, like the best workplace (2023). It's a long story. To summarize, it all started with COVID in 2020, in March. I had a hyperbaric chamber at home because my father had dementia and I was trying to cure him with it. In the first week of COVID, he passed away. What I did was contact the supplier and said: "I need a big hyperbaric chamber for the employees because it was the only way to save someone who couldn't breathe anymore because oxygen couldn't be metabolized with the iron in the blood. It wasn't so much a lung problem as it was much talked about. It was more a problem of oxygen metabolism with iron and the only way to save these people was with the hyperbaric chamber.
We acquired a large hyperbaric chamber for four people. What we thought of doing was bringing people in completely illegally because you couldn't go out on the street, but if an employee had a problem, bring them here at night, imagine. In the end, we didn't have to do that. There are people who died, who were hired, who worked for Alea in Barcelona, there were many deaths. We didn't have to use it like that. We did a total renovation. Now it's much nicer, more elegant, more pleasant and we use it for recovery, for meetings, for example, if you didn't sleep enough or did a lot of sports. And around it, we built a whole health program.
What things have you implemented in the company to improve the quality of life of the employees?
We have a gym, we have up to three personal training sessions for employees per day. There's vegetarian food every day in the company, they drink water, very important thing, which is in glass bottles, mineral water (volcanic), another water that is Santañol, another is Bichi Catalán. Why? Because we are realizing, especially in recent months, that there are many microplastics in bottled water in plastic and tap water, even with a filter, an osmosis, which costs €10,000, in the end, will have heavy metals, will have microplastics, etc. The water they drink is healthy. We also did a lot of tests with the air because we are in an industrial area. It's super clean. The light we use is not LED light. They are old lights that don't flicker.
There's a sauna. Three years ago everyone received a ring and a bracelet (whoop) connected to an app and we can see each other, not the company watching, how they feel in recovery, if they did enough sports, if they slept well and we're starting to do challenges. So, we have ‘Fasting Challenge, eating within an 8 or 6-hour window at most per day. We all challenge each other, look at our data, if it worked for you, or not.
‘Sleep Challenge’, let's all sleep until 10, 11 at night. Stop eating 3 or 4 hours before sleeping because we know it impacts sleep very negatively. ‘Sauna Challenge’, 5 minutes of sauna, 3 times a week. ‘Sport Challenge’, 3 times 1 hour of sport per week. We're doing all these challenges and it's not that the company is monitoring and saying, but among them there's a chat where they talk and challenge each other: what worked for you or not?
I imagine people are very happy there with all these improvements…
Yes, but people are happy for two reasons. They are happy because the company offers this, but they are happy because they are happy. I mean, if you have a group of people who sleep better, just talking about sleep, let's stick with sleep because it's the basis, the most important, these people are happier. They interact much better with each other. If a manager comes and has 5 hours of sleep, he will start communicating stress to his employees.
So, it's fundamentally important that we do this and there are two ways to see it: a very humanistic way, because we do this because the company wants to offer its employees what we think is the best gift we can give which is their health. Because bad sleep for years leads to Alzheimer's, to many terrible pathologies. I lived this with my father. So, this humanistic view is at the heart of the device we implemented at Alea.
And what would be the other way to see it?
There's a fairly capitalist view, it's quite simple and every company should do this because it's the best investment it can make, where it will have better results. A fact that happened in the 1940s, after World War II can serve as an example. It was in a factory where only women worked and they asked the manager for a 5-minute break at 11 a.m. to have coffee, which would be paid by the factory. The board denied it, but they insisted, went on strike and, in the end, they got it. After the 5-minute break was introduced, the owners realized that productivity increased brutally and then discovered that if they let their employees relax a bit, giving them coffee, the work would improve. So why not go a little further? And I help you get in shape and find out that alcohol is bad for your health, for example, and I accompany you? And I provide sports within the company and good food, pure water, sauna, etc.
And what does that cost? It costs something, and what would it cost me, on the other hand, to put a ping pong table or something like that? Okay, I'll invest a little more, but I know that the impact on your personal life, on your health will be much greater and that this will benefit the company. It's fundamental and we're opening a program now just to conclude this, because we have a hyperbaric chamber. Which is very important for people who have Alzheimer's, dementia, Parkinsons. We are inviting, encouraging our employees to bring their family members, their parents to the company.
I started with my father. There are other employees who have parents who started to have this type of pathology and we are inviting them to bring them to the company to benefit from this technology, which is not in all hospitals and, if it is, it will be more for treating people who have suffered burns or who need to amputate a leg due to diabetes, but not so much for dementia, Alzheimer, Parkinsons. We are seeing really fantastic results with parents of some of our employees who could only sleep 2 hours a night, now they are sleeping 4 or 5 hours thanks to the hyperbaric chamber, where tremors are decreasing. We are just starting, and it doesn't cost us anything, the hyperbaric chamber is there for your father, your mother. It doesn't cost anything, and we should make our people take advantage of it, obviously.
Source: Exclusive GMB
