Driving the casino in regulated markets

Stian Hornsletten, of EveryMatrix, assesses the virtues of the firm’s CasinoEngine platform solution.

“CasinoEngine speeds things up by handling all of the integration and creating a unified framework towards operators’ product offering, reporting obligations, systems, and their own platform.”

EGR Intel (EGR): How has the CasinoEngine business been developing in 2019?

Stian Hornsletten (SH): We have experienced continued growth this year, which has been even stronger than it was at this point last year. In 2018, we launched into five new regulated markets, and our target for 2019 is to enter another five. So far, we have launched into Sweden, and the next market going live will be Columbia, followed by the Spanish market later in the year.

EGR: What processes is CasinoEngine simplifying for casino operators looking to enter new markets?

SH: Each client will have a different approach from market to market, depending on their needs. Operators have complete autonomy in choosing how they wish to work with CasinoEngine, which currently offers a comprehensive platform and an API direct integration method for gaming content. Many are seeking the full suite – an iGaming integration platform which facilitates fast market entry both technically and operationally.

In the technical sense, CasinoEngine speeds things up by handling all of the integration and creating a unified framework towards operators’ product offering, reporting obligations, systems, and their own platform.

Our team is committed to maintaining the vendor integrations while offering support and ongoing feedback. We work closely with our clients to review their gaming offering, optimize KPIs and increase revenue.

When an operator is preparing to launch into a new market, our team takes a proactive role, identifying on behalf of the client who are the key players within the new market, and what are the most relevant and popular games in that respective territory. We are willing to invest significant resources in putting together the best possible offering for our clients, and we view this way of working as an important differentiator for us. Working closely with operators in this way ensures a high rate of success for new market entrants.

The CasinoEngine solution also allows operators to overlay over the vendors’ games, and they can display all the requirements when it comes to session time, game losses, and more. All of this data is unified across all their gaming vendors. We also handle session limits across all vendors, which takes away a lot of the responsible gaming requirements from the operators.

EGR: What are the key considerations when entering a new market?

SH: CasinoEngine acts like a plug-and-play solution, so the process is therefore easy and simple for operators, once they’ve decided to expand into a new market. Before beginning the integration, the operator investigates to see what the country regulator expects from a new market player. Operators are also determining how much revenue they will gain from each game before the users begin to play.

One other key consideration is time, and the ability to act fast and seize opportunities as they arise. One of our strategic advantages is that we can offer the biggest selection of content in the industry. Therefore, having an extensive and diversified range of content from multiple vendors permits operators to address specific user groups and demographics in a timely manner.

EGR: Beyond gaming content, how is CasinoEngine helping operators with retention and acquisition?

SH: We have built the Unified Bonus System as a standalone bonus application which sits and listens synchronously to all transactions, across products, happening in the wallets. This happens extremely quickly and there is no latency on any gameplay. Due to its modularity, we plan to extend the bonus system even to other sports and casino platforms, beyond our own OddsMatrix and CasinoEngine products.

Our bonus system offers a variety of bonus types, with a large common configuration base, which makes the process of creating a campaign very similar whether you create a cashback scheme for live casino players or a free bet offer for sports, triggered by signup. While UBS offers bonus types that allow our clients to create fully automated lifetime reward tracks using nothing but the bonus system itself, it also exposes trigger APIs to clients that wants to build their own loyalty – and retention systems, such as loyalty shops and levelling, while using the bonus system for handling the actual rewards.

As of now, the bonus system features bonus types such as bonus money, casino free spins, sports free bets, wagering bonus programs that can be set up with any number of levels, each offering different and instant rewards, and cashback. Both tournaments and FPP will be added to the portfolio in Q3 2019. Any bonus type can be set up with a variety of event triggers and conditioning.

Stian Hornsletten is CasinoEngine CEO and EveryMatrix co-founder and has over 19 years’ experience in the internet gaming industry. He holds an engineering degree in computer science and a degree in socioeconomics. He was an early entrant into betting exchanges and online poker, and his skills in product innovation are propelling EveryMatrix’s casino product forward.