CalvinAyre.com’s Becky Liggero interviewed FSB Business Development Director Richard Thorp, who spoke on the company’s future plans.
Sports betting platform provider FSB Tech UK has been expanding for the past four years, and according to Business Development Director Richard Thorp, the company has been “taking the industry by storm.”
He told CalvinAyre.com, “I think it’s very interesting where, I think the first couple of years, we were very focused on the UK, and now we are definitely moving into other territories. Africa was a very large growth area for us, probably over the last two years, and now Asia, and obviously the U.S. is becoming very interesting. We’ve just launched a sports betting area into a large casino in Manila in the Philippines to check up on, and I think there’s a lot more opportunity in that same territory, which is very exciting.”
FSB recently showcased a new range of self-service betting terminals (SSBTs), to be released in 2019. According to Thorp, his company’s success in varying locations worldwide is attributable to the products themselves. He said, “I think the main thing is our platform is just very modular, so when we’ve gone into Africa, it’s been very interesting that there were different components that were required, mainly payment providers, different layouts of websites needed to take SMS betting, USSD betting. We needed to be sort of retrofitted for an Opera browser, but all of these things could be swapped out, and switched around as required. So it’s not a one-size-fits-all product. I guess it’s very useful and very light to deploy into multiple territories.”
Thorp sees this in contrast to the past, where some companies would use such a ‘one size fits all’ approach. “They found putting a huge legacy large operation from the UK into, say, a market like Italy, has been very costly and time-consuming, and I think we take all of that pain away.”
Amid growth operations globally, operations of FSB have largely been limited to London. “Actually, it is interesting. All of our staff are London-based, and there’s a cost and expense that goes with that. We’ve recently moved into new offices, which are interestingly the old William Hill R&D offices in Shoreditch [District]. I guess moving into spaces where young staff want to come and work with you is useful, so Shoreditch is obviously very attractive especially for the technology side,” he said.
Thorp foresees setting up abroad, although could give no timeframe for this. “We’ve done it organically up to this point, but I think we’re now starting to get into a position where we can accelerate. Potentially, we might look to open up more offices overseas, but at the moment, we’re still very much a London-based company,” he said.
