Ebbe Groes, EveryMatrix: Reaping the rewards of recent OddsMatrix overhaul

Ahead of next week’s ICE London, SBC News sat down with Ebbe Groes, CEO of EveryMatrix, to discuss the recent revamp and commercial development of OddsMatrix – the company’s sports betting product suite.

SBC: At the beginning of a new year, how would you evaluate OddsMatrix’s performance in 2019?

Ebbe Groes: Last year was truly fantastic, from many points of view, and I am very content with what we’ve achieved. I am in a privileged position to say that I am a very happy CEO and the future looks very bright not only for OddsMatrix, but for the rest of the EveryMatrix products as well.

Highlights for OddsMatrix include the launch of 20 new sportsbook clients as well as the increase of the turnover by almost four times than the previous year, and this is something we are really proud of.

In the past years, we’ve heavily focused on the reconstruction of this product, and now I can say that this investment in our software has been rewarded entirely. All of our existing large clients migrated to the new product and grew their turnover as a direct result. The ability to launch and help clients enter new markets was heavily influenced by the product revamp, and in 2019 we cherry-picked the rewards.

With a good team and a substantial financial investment, it’s not that hard to build a sports betting platform which can seem appealing to startups and small operators. But making ongoing investments, requesting feedback, developing new features on request, and maintaining a market-first approach is what truly makes great technology providers stand out in this space, and OddsMatrix is one of them.

SBC: What were the key reasons behind the OddsMatrix sportsbook overhaul?

EG: Sport is our identity, so we were always very passionate and interested in keeping our OddsMatrix solution ahead of the curve. This is EveryMatrix’s most complex product and first to go live back in 2009. After the initial launch, we received a lot of positive feedback from clients, and we quickly became a key player in the white-label sports betting arena. At the time, we were offering competitive odds and a wide range of betting markets for many bookmakers across the world.

Before deciding to revamp OddsMatrix, we focused for a couple of years on the development of our casino product. We wrote a new solution, with no code reuse from other products, solely focusing on creating a platform to streamline the day-to-day operations and productivity in the casino vertical.

CasinoEngine remains a big hit thanks to its increased flexibility, productivity tools and enhanced offerings. Immediately after finishing that project, we realised that we need to take OddsMatrix through the same process, so we won’t lose parity between the new fast-growing CasinoEngine and established, but not so flexible at the time OddsMatrix.

Once you have a new incredible product live, you can clearly see the potential, and you want all of your products to rise to the same level. Overhauling OddsMatrix wasn’t an easy decision, but I am glad we invested so much because today we have a leading and modern sports betting offering, with a robust back-end, flexible front-end with endless possibilities and many real-time sports data APIs – just to name a few competitive advantages and features we can easily offer to our clients today.

SBC: What part of the new OddsMatrix product you take most pride out of?

EG: There are a lot of components we are proud of. But probably the most remarkable is our new highly customisable front-end. Our most successful partners, on both casino and sports, are focused on creating exceptional player experiences via personalised, tailored front-ends.

We are pleased to see so many operators investing significant resources towards this, rather than just choosing a standard template to work with. Our team built a very powerful API, and we can support bookmakers in their endeavour of creating outstanding websites with ease and in a timely matter. The goal here is to enable clients to tune their brand proposition in any way they find fit.

The new API is specially built to enable clients to interact with the system in the same way our own team does. Our end goal was to offer bookmakers the possibility to implement any idea they have, no matter how bold or unusual it seems. We have two operators live on the new front-end, both up-and-coming, and both with original and very different ideas than the industry’s standard.

By only using HTML and JavaScript to build the new front-end, we’ve eliminated the need to have servers and databases. Development teams can write the code and it will sit in the users’ browser in the same way that a mobile app does.

SBC: The esports market had an accelerated growth rate in these past years, was this the main reason why you launched your esports services at the beginning of last year?

EG: We’ve been around in sports betting for over a decade now, and our interest is to always keep our offering market-relevant and up to date. Seeing how much traction esports have gained over the last years convinced us to tackle this area and create a new product component. The new esports services, along with our sportsbook, data feeds, and aggregation technology ensures that the product stays competitive and has something to offer to every type of bookmaker, depending on its needs and size.

Our approach is quite straightforward: we aim to offer a wide selection of betting markets, tournaments and games, all available for bookmakers, affiliates or fan sites via a single and fast integration.

Thanks to our modular system, in only six short months we managed to make available a growing offer of 85+ betting types and a wide selection of popular titles such as FIFA, Call of Duty, CS:GO, WOW or StarCraft 2. We see client interest rising towards this new field, and we expect some new signings by the end of H1 this year.

SBC: Finally, what are your key sportsbook goals for the next 12 months?

EG: We believe that having this fantastic freedom to tweak the front-end proposition will lead in migrating existing clients to the new system, both clients with front-ends built by them and also operators with websites made employing OddsMatrix own development resources.

One other goal we have set for our teams in 2020 is to continue to enrich the platform functionalities by adding more exciting back office UI functionalities, as well as promotions and player features.

EveryMatrix’s team will be at ICE London from 4-6 of February (Stand N6-310) to showcase their latest developments, meet old and new friends, and speak about iGaming opportunities.

The original version of this interview has been published by SBC News on January 31, 2020, under the title Ebbe Groes, EveryMatrix: Reaping the rewards of recent OddsMatrix overhaul.