With SBC’s Betting on Football (BOF) coming up quickly, in-play personalization is on my mind because it was a hot topic of discussion during the event’s 2018 installment. I interviewed BetVictor’s Matt Scarrott at BOF on the very topic of how to bridge the in-play personalization gap in sports betting, a challenge just about every sports betting operator was facing at the time.
“Lets fast forward to where we are now, if you look at the majority of in-play offerings that we see in sports betting, its still not very personal. There still isn’t a great deal of personalized content – or any in a lot of cases – and that’s partly why we set up Graphyte. Its difficult to solve technically and we wanted to build a solution for that,” revealed Graphyte’s Co-Founder and CEO Damien Evans.
Graphyte is a 1-year-old marketing technology and personalization platform for gaming built on AI. Evans has a special focus on in-play sports betting personalization and in fact will be speaking at Betting on Football 2019 on personalization during one of the marketing panels.
“Fundamentally we pull in customer play data and bet data. There are a lot of things said about artificial intelligence at the moment, I think people really need to remember that the crux of artificial intelligence is actually making better decisions, faster and cheaper. That’s what we do in Graphyte,” Evans explained.
“The typical in-play inventory for an operator is huge, there’s a lot of bets, the prices change all the time, there’s a lot of different markets – hundreds of markets on an event – a lot of betting opportunities and the way we deploy AI is to speed up our decision making and make sure we know what to show a customer at the right time. Its all about speed, especially with in-play,” he said.
“In its simplest form [Graphyte is] changing the on-site experience and making it easier for customers to bet. If we want to think of a more complex, nuanced example, lets say a customer placed a pre-event bet, Graphyte will know when that event’s going in-play, we will know what in-play market they would like to have and we can send them a push or an SMS with a specific market and bet straight to that customer and its completely unique,” he added.
While one of the fundamentals of Graphyte’s platform is to simplify the user experience when it comes to in-play and betting, they also strive to simplify the operator’s experience – the platform itself has been designed with ease of operator integration in mind.
“We’ve done it in such a way that its flexible enough to work with things like data from the browsers…things like when a user is in an app and they’re doing stuff, we can track that. We can also connect to the backend, so major sports book providers and that means we have the complete picture,” explained Evans.
“Our platform is really flexible and the key here is its industry-specific. We only do betting and gaming. The way that we handle sports data is very much like every major sports backend, so no complex mapping is required, a football bet is a football bet. We understand that and I think that’s one of the key differences between Graphyte and say, other after-market solutions that are fit for eCommerce,” he said.
“There’s effort required to integrate, but it couldn’t be any easier to integrate than it is with Graphyte,” Evans added.
Such a clear picture of what’s needed to facilitate in-play personalization from a B2B and B2C perspective can only come from professionals with a rich sports betting industry experience, something the Graphyte founders are happy to share.
“The whole reason behind launching Graphyte was to solve a problem we couldn’t buy a solution for,” Evans revealed.
“Rob’s my partner, he’s the CTO, he was the CTO of Ladbrokes and Coral and I used to run marketing analytics and before that BI. We tried to buy in personalization solutions to personalize the sports betting, first on Ladbrokes, then on Ladbrokes Coral and really struggled to buy the technology, so we went away and thought, ‘lets go and build it,’” he said.
