The American gambling market is just different. While Americans have been gambling in one way or another just as long as anybody, the opening of the U.S. market has introduced old hands to a new fresh feeling that they’re not used to, and introduced new opportunities to everyone. Matt Stephenson, Managing Director of Betgenius, joined our Becky Liggero at the sidelines of the Betting on Sports America conference to talk about the feeling he was having.
“It’s incredibly exciting,” Stephenson said, referring to the atmosphere of the first ever Betting on Sports conference to be held in America. “I mean, we’ve been doing these sorts of shows for 15 odd years, and I’ve been seeing you for many of those years doing these shows. And there’s a general sense of sort of real optimism here actually. I think in the U.K. and Europe, we can be a bit cynical about these shows sometimes. But people have turned up, they’re willing to learn, they’re happy to have sensible conversations, and yeah, there’s a real sense of optimism in the air, so really enjoying it.”
While that enthusiasm comes from many of the new and re-invigorated players in the market, old pros like Stephenson have been working hard to be ready for this day. “We’ve been sort of playing this game with regard to the U.S. for five or six years,” he noted. “We’ve been getting ready for these days, getting our products and services ready, making sure as a business that we’re ready to enter this market.”
Luckily, Betgenius is ready, and they have plenty of things to offer to American partners, looking to profit off of the new rush of customers. “So there’s a whole suite of services, tools, products that sit underneath the Betgenius banner,” he commented. “On one side we’re providing content to regulated sportsbooks here, data, managed services. On the other end of the scale, we’re providing full turnkey systems as well. Increasingly, many of the U.S. operators are looking for ways of acquiring new customers. There’s this absolute gold rush for new customers in online territories such as New Jersey, and many of them are using our Genius sports media marketing tools to help them acquire customers to bring the cost of that down.”
But they’re not just an overseas provider looking to profit off of the change in the American status quo. Stephenson notes that Betgenius is putting down their own roots in the country. “We’ve got one guy in Washington, and we’ve got a couple of commercial representatives in New York,” he remarked. “We’re still deciding where our east coast home is going to be, so we’ll let you know when we decide that. But at the moment we’ve got an office of 50-60 people in [Los Angeles] doing lots of stuff on our marketing tools, on our front end. We have invested heavily in the States, we’re going to continue to do that.”
