Stian Hornsletten: Tailoring casino content to the fast-growing Spanish market

Stian Hornsletten, CasinoEngine CEO and Co-Founder of EveryMatrix, sat down with CasinoBeats to explain the opportunities presented by the regulatory shifts in Spain, why the company has invested in supporting the quickest integration of country-specific casino content, and how it has increased gameplay time and subsequent player ‘stickiness’ through its new Live Lobby.

We learned that players in Spain staked €8.2bn on casino games in 2018, up 33.1% year-on-year from the previous year; how much confidence does this give EveryMatrix to push on with its plans for the market in 2019 and beyond?

Stian Hornsletten: EveryMatrix is always striving to help clients enter new regulated markets, and the regulatory shifts in Spain present our business with terrific opportunities. The iGaming market in Spain is growing, and we trust it will continue its trend in the following years. Since we have learned about these changes in Spain, we took significant steps in that direction, and we are pleased we already have a couple of substantial deals in place that targets Spain, soon to be announced.

Spain is an attractive gaming destination, especially for our casino solution. CasinoEngine is EveryMatrix’s top performing solution because of its ability to offer clients fast market access, and this is precisely what we have done in the past in several other attractive markets. The demand for market-specific content in the casino business has grown tremendously over the past years and the capacity to deliver it on time and in the right market is an essential competitive advantage we have.

Offering a mix of local and global vendors with all responsible gaming features handled by us, CasinoEngine is a single stop for the increasingly attractive opportunities offered by the Spanish online gaming market.

Through the efforts made with certification and licensing in multiple regulated markets, the platform can faster and faster be tailored to comply with additional jurisdictions. We will focus next on helping operators reaching Colombia and Italy.

Can you further explain your strategy and what strategic advantages will CasinoEngine give to operators looking to enter Spain in the following year?

SH: To put it simply, CasinoEngine puts operators in full control of their gaming offering and works as a plug-and-play solution. We are offering a wealth of content, over 8000 games from 140 vendors and sub-vendors, ranging from established and reputable gaming giants to newer gaming studios or niche suppliers.

This immense collection of content is not to give to one operator, but it’s supporting us in our endeavour to provide the right selection of content to operators activating in different markets. Having a large and diversified range of content from multiple vendors allows operators to address specific user groups and demographics.

Our clients can choose the most relevant country-specific content for their casinos and also have access to the most extensive library in the industry. Moreover, in the last years, we have invested tremendously into our capacity to rapidly add new vendors on the go so if an operator wants to enter Spain and needs a certain vendor, we can support this integration fast and deliver the project in record time.

From a technical point of view, CasinoEngine handles all responsible gaming features across all the gaming vendors. To this end, we will make sure that session or spending limits are calculated correctly according to the Spanish legislation, thus protecting both the players and the operator.

CasinoEngine is an API based solution so we can enable operators or other industry platform suppliers to integrate and get access to our gaming portfolio quickly; we act as a layer of integration between the operator, the supplier or the casino vendor, on top of the aggregation.

Can you explain some of the player habits or expectations that you must consider when tailoring casino content to the Spanish market?

SH: I think the process of choosing the right content for a specific market is roughly the same, from an operators’ standpoint. The framework includes a rigorous market scan, as well as sit-downs with key stakeholders in the region, such as suppliers, gaming providers, and other 3rd parties of interest.

Established content giants are the primary go-to source when first entering a new market, and this is a legitimate choice, and I think operators can also include country-based niche vendors in their gaming mix for diversity.

Without a doubt, the tailoring comes after having sound insights about the target group of players. As such, in the next period, our focus is to improve our game performance scoring. We want to be able to compare games like-for-like to understand their net value to the operator.

This can be done quickly if you have a decent number of players, by calculating player session lengths, costs, NGR of games and the churn. We believe this scoring will prove truly valuable for operators looking to expand in new markets, and it will certainly be interesting to see why Spanish players enjoy a specific type of gambling.

So far, poker, bingo and following closely lottery have supremacy in this market, but we will track this carefully to see if anything changes over the next period.

Finally, what can you tell us about the EveryMatrix Live Lobby, and what this will bring to the player experience?

SH: Our product targets UX enhancements with the end goal of offering personalised and localised casino experiences. CasinoEngine aims to provide the context and technology for operators to unlock their creativity in every market they activate in. This enables them to build their entire front-end experience or to tweak and fine-tune their brand proposition.

The new Live Lobby allows players to view real-time, in-game statistics, table availability, game features on live tables for extending gameplay and stickiness. We can aggregate data across several casino vendors and provide it to the user with little effort.

The original version of this interview has been published by CasinoBeats on May 17, 2019 under the title Stian Hornsletten, EveryMatrix: Tailoring casino content to the fast-growing Spanish market.