Hillside Technology Limited, the technology arm of gambling giant bet365, has announced the creation of its new Platform Innovation Hub – a new technology department focused on innovation and process excellence.

Platform Innovation has been charged with two key directives – to explore new technologies and identify whether they can make a meaningful, material, and lasting contribution to the platform, and to collaborate with technology teams to establish ways in which successful processes can be integrated across departments.

Platform Innovation will provide insight, expert guidance, tools and benchmarks, it will connect people across the organisation provide a space to experiment with new technologies and approaches.

Alan Reed, Bet365’s current head of systems development who will lead the new department, said: “We’ve typically taken an internal approach to innovation. The strength of our product and the creativity of the people who engineer it, has ensured we’ve continued to lead the market. Looking forward, we want to take the next quantum leap and doing so will require looking outward and exploring the new technologies and processes that exist outside of our purview.”

Platform Innovation will start with a team of specialists from a broad technology church that will ultimately empower innovation, recruited from both inside and outside of bet365.

“We’re looking for free thinkers who excel at solving real world problems. People who can approach technologies like the Metaverse, Bitcoin and ChatGPT without bias, pull them apart, and return with ideas on how they can disrupt our business. In addition to our internal and external recruitment, we will run a residency programme to immerse our people in a culture of innovation and determine how it can be driven into their departments,” Reed added.