Liam Casey is the CEO of Tailorbet, an innovative betting exchange that removes the role of the bookmaker and puts the power into the hands of the users by facilitating a peer-to-peer system. With Tailorbet, users are able to generate their own customized real money bets, currently the only betting exchange platform on the market with such an offering.
Casey has over twelve years of experience in the online gambling industry and identified an opportunity in the UK sportsbetting market where there is currently a lack of product differentiation. Striking a B2B deal with Tailorbet allows bookmakers the opportunity to offer a more personalized product to their customers, something to help differentiate them from the other traditional fixed-odds bookies out there.
The plans for Tailorbet are promising and aggressive, including the push of a B2C offering this summer and a social media strategy rollout. To learn more about Tailorbet, the importance of differentiation, customisation and personalisation, I met with Casey here in London for an interview.
Becky Liggero: Thank you for joining me today, Liam, lets start with you explaining why Tailorbet is unique in the industry and why it has revolutionized the betting exchange industry.
Liam Casey: Thank you Becky, nice to be here. We built a unique platform for Tailorbet that, unlike traditional exchanges that match money to money, we directly match people to people. So this is very different from the likes of Betfair or Matchbook.
We’ve built some unique technology. Technology means we removed the need for traders completely, so we have automatic bet verification when bets are struck and we also do automatic bet settlement, things that don’t necessarily exist with other people in the space.
BL: Excellent and I know you’ve been in the online gambling industry for quite a long time and there’s this issue with differentiation now amongst some of the bookmakers, especially here in the UK- everything is kind of the same. Tell me how Tailorbet addresses this differentiation problem that we have today.
LC: I absolutely agree with you, Becky. I think that the key differentiators today, certainly for the fixed odds bookmakers that are out there, is brand and its customer experience. The actual product and the markets and the variation in product they have, there’s very little difference in terms of all the big guys that are out there today.
What we’ve done is something that’s brand new. There are bets that can be created via Tailorbet that do not currently exist in fixed odds bookmakers. For example, you can choose for any player to score more goals than any other player in any particular league on any given Sunday. You can choose for any team to score more goals than any other team and this is not just teams that are playing each other.
Typically in fixed odds bookmaking you have markets for teams that are playing each other that day. With Tailorbet, you pick a favorite team, you can pick a bet that you like and run it on the day, you can run it in a week, or run it over the whole season. This means that there are actually tens of thousands of different types of bets that are available for people to either create and also if they have already been created, to oppose at a better value than you can get at current bookmakers.
BL- Yes, its quite different, isn’t it. I know today we have the technology available to make this peer-to-peer system work really well, social media is a way to generate more users and increase liquidity. Tell me how Tailorbet is going to use social media to bring more awareness to your brand.
LC: I think there are two things that we’re doing with social media. There has been a struggle for gambling companies to really be seen to penetrate social media in any meaningful way. You do have some fantastic companies like Paddy Power who have penetrated in using it in a tone of voice and how they present their brand to customers, but there’s been a real struggle to try and find a way in which gambling companies can directly monitize social media.
The reality is that people love talking about their teams – they love talking about their favorite players – but they don’t necessarily, certainly to date, like talking like ‘I bet this much on this player’ or ‘I won or lost this much’. With what we’ve got its so unique, particularly on the bet creation side, that the odds that you see for particular games that may be available at Paddy Power for example, me as an individual, I can create my own bet with my own odds which I believe to be of interest to my peers.
So I could be out playing football with my buddies, we could be talking about Messi scoring or not scoring in the Champion’s League final. All the odds that are available out there at the moment with the fixed odds bookmakers are commoditized, they are very similar, but if I have a firm belief that I don’t think Messi is going to have a good day, I can create a bet and I can offer odds that are far greater than would be available at the fixed odds bookmakers. That’s something that I can share unique to my friends and with Tailorbet you can share it directly with individuals, a group, or offer into the network for anybody to take.
The second way in which we’re engaging with social media is that we’ve found
that particularly for sports players and that people who have an interest in sports, Twitter is the go-to place for them in terms of news, updates, scores.
We’re just starting to kick off campaigns whereby we are hashtagging teams and players with those unique bets and those unique odds. We’d love to see ex-players challenge each other in terms of saying ‘well I believe my team is going to beat your team’- they currently have no way to do that via the ‘old school’ bookmakering.
With Tailorbet, you can pick your team, pick your favorite player, you can pick your score and then you can push it out to people and challenge them- you’re putting your money where your mouth is.
BL: You have some exciting plans ahead of you there, Liam. Anything else you wanted to add today?
LC: We’ve talked to a lot of people over the past year and the feedback in terms of the product that we’ve built, the interface that we’ve built, the fact that we’ve built everything mobile first, the fact that we’re pushing customization and personalization to end users and we’re giving people and allowing them control in terms of bets and odds, there’s been nothing but positive feedback about that.
We’re still early days but we’re really looking forward to being what we believe we are, the next generation of betting.
BL: Fantastic. Best of luck and thank you so much for joining me today.
