Morten Hauge, Head of Sports at Aspire Global. 

It’s now six months since Aspire Global purchased sportsbook and technology provider BtoBet. Together with the acquisition of aggregator and games studio Pariplay, it was a bold move designed to propel Aspire Global into the ranks of the world’s leading iGaming suppliers. Now, with the European football championships around the corner, what has changed in the interim and what can the company’s operator partners expect from its sports betting proposition? 5 Star caught up with Morten Hauge, Head of Sports to find out.

What are you offering that differentiates Aspire Global from your competitors?

With our solution, operators benefit from our leading CRM system along with our advanced sportsbook solution. This is particularly advantageous because sportsbook CRM has often been considered difficult to manage. You need to formulate an expansive sporting calendar in order for it to function effectively and besides that, it is also closely paired to trading, so that it echoes the behaviour of players. Offering a sports-focused CRM tool for partners is a unique selling point of ours. 

We have created a very clear channel linking trading, CRM, and acquisition. The trading team is our eyes and ears when it comes to the product and market trends and they know what customers are placing bets on. They can package this data and distribute it on to CRM and acquisition, which is very valuable – particularly with Euro 2020 coming up soon.

What will be key during this tournament is to have a very stable product and engaging campaigns for customers. One major way to achieve this in our eyes is by offering packaged bets. While alternatives like bet-builders are useful, many players prefer to have offers packaged together rather than taking the additional steps to create them from scratch. For example, England to win and Harry Kane to score is very good for acquisition: it appeals to both those who follow the team and those who appreciate the player. With this type of bet, our trading team gets together to build a plan to offer a packaged bet and commits to that. 

The result is that we have an enticing offering and this a key element we will bring to our partners once they are immersed fully in our new CRM solution.

What new products can operators expect?

In terms of the actual sportsbook product, we are gradually introducing innovations that are exclusive to our partners. For example, last year we introduced an industry-first sports betting tournament, while we also have the best bet recommendation engine in the industry, which looks at an individual customer’s own bets and suggests markets based on those. 

We are also able to recommend bets in real-time. This is unique and it helps the customer engage with wider content within the sportsbook. For example, if a player on a site is betting on the Premier League, our bet recommendation engine shows them another player who is in profit who just placed a bet on the Malaysian second division. It is then a lot easier to engage with a small stake if that player wants some additional entertainment.

How do you help them reach out to their customers?

We are currently rolling out a real-time, data-driven marketing CRM tool. While we collect data to determine a player’s skill level, we also store player behaviours. What are their favourite sports, market types and how did they convert? All of this data goes into the CRM tool. It is still early days, but once this solution is ready, we will be able to provide individual messages to players, depending

on what they prefer to bet on. The way to achieve this is through automation and we are placing more and more focus on this area. 

In pre-Covid times at least, tournaments like the Euros are great social occasions. How does Aspire Global put the social into sportsbook?

We were first to market and still, nobody else comes close to our provision for sports betting tournaments. Usually, the everyday player does not have the opportunity to beat the smart guys, but in tournaments it isn’t always the smart customers who will end up winning – and this is the message we try to get across. Our tournaments take place over a short period of time and all players need to do is land a big accumulator to win. The educational aspect within tournaments is something we are working on. The message is that players don’t need to be good to win, rather it’s about fun and the social element. 

Also in development, and something that will be launched before Euro 2020, is our tournaments as an FTP version. This will help educate players to get used to the concept without having to spend, while also providing a very useful pushing tool for our acquisition team.

You now have clients across Europe, Africa, and Latin America. How does sportsbook provision differ in these regions?

For Africa, Aspire Global’s BtoBet has offered what we consider to be the best possible solution. Load speed is hugely important for our customers, with so many players now accessing sites through smartphones. In the front end, we have a lite version which is very quick. 

We also have different sportsbook layouts for LatAm and Africa and when we enter the US, again the customer will be presented with a specific layout that caters for their betting patterns. Market types and leagues people bet on varies hugely from region to region and risk strategies differ as well. 

You need to have a slightly different solution depending on the regulations within any given country and this requires a lot of work. A strong PAM ( Player Account Management ) is the key here. In Betfair’s case in Colombia, for example, they are bringing their entire sportsbook data feed into our risk management tool on our platform. The platform is key, as to be compliant is both time-consuming and costly.

How do you ensure that operators’ websites don’t all look the same?

It all depends on the operator and flexibility from our side in this case is vital. With our solution, you have the ability to build your own solution out of the box through the API and we have partners who have done that. It is also possible in our backend to move various widgets around as you see fit within the dashboard. For partners who prefer a range of templates to choose from, we equally cater to those wishes.  

We also have different versions of widgets for different partners. For example, one of our partners has a setup where they can choose between a LatAm layout of the widget, or a layout suited to European markets. We can also build new widgets for specific areas for partners, with each brand having control over how they are laid out. All in all, we work hand in hand with our partners to come up with the perfect solution that matches their vision.