Scientific Games: Lockdown has given us the opportunity to reflect and innovate

For many, lockdown has been an opportunity to slow down, take stock and innovate – and Keith O’Loughlin, SVP for Sportsbook and Platforms at Scientific Games Digital pointed out that it has also been a chance to focus on the people-side of the business.

With SBC Digital Summit North America fast approaching, Keith O’Loughlin explained that the event gives him the chance to ‘stick his head above the parapet’ and learn from other industry experts about how they’ve adapted to operating under COVID.

What are you looking forward to at the SBC Digital Summit North America?

I think the world has had some time to take stock since February and March. But if we look at this industry before, say over the last ten years, we’ve been moving a breakneck pace. People have been travelling to customers, travelling to trade shows, and everything has moved at a hectic pace. In some ways, that’s probably not given everybody the thinking time and the time for innovation that they would like to have. But I think people would like that time.

This week, I’m really looking forward to seeing and hearing people’s fresh ideas because I think that this will be a very unique perspective on what’s happening in the world as people will have taken this time to take stock.

I think people have had the time over the last few months to think differently and so I’m really looking forward to seeing what innovations have arisen as a result.

What would be your biggest bit of advice for betting and gaming businesses trying to mitigate the impact of COVID-19?

I’d say my biggest piece of advice is to do things with confidence. Those businesses that have tried to adapt haven’t panicked, they’ve got good fundamentals in place. Some businesses have integrated new offerings like table tennis, virtuals, a broader product range. We’re in a sports betting business, and if you look at the sports that we offer to customers, they’re all championing a particular sport but the key is variety.

Golf is a good example of this, it’s not about how good you are at golf, it’s how your putting is and how you hold your nerve at the time. And I think this is something really important for the time that we’re in now.

What are you promoting at SBC Digital Summit North America?

The biggest area that we’re promoting, which we feel is very innovative and very supportive for the industry, is OpenMarket™. OpenMarket™ is where we pre-integrate all of the various products, suppliers, and try to keep that technical integration as seamless for the customer as possible so that they can just do one integration with us.

An operator can then choose to take different elements, like streaming, esports or virtuals and mix up their offering – and it really changes up the dynamic for somebody that’s running a sportsbook instead of leaving them to deal with their technical teams and wondering how much the integration is going to cost.

We’re trying to enable sportsbooks to be sportsbooks and to really focus on the customers, and to set out all of the products they want at the start rather than forcing them down the line of having to go through a long-winded integration process.

We’ve already got 36 partners for OpenMarket™, and we’re adding more every week. We’re simply taking away all of that integration technology and making the process as seamless as possible.

What industry innovation will capture the most attention in 2020?

Honestly, I think this varies on each jurisdiction. So in the US, I think it’s going to be around Bet Builders and same game multis for US sports.

All you need to do is be in a sportsbook at a casino on a Sunday, if it’s open, and what you’ll see is people wearing the colours of their team – they are all in on their team. But when you think about sports betting, customers want good odds. If someone bets $10, they want to win $1000, not bet $10 and win $10. So right now, I think the only way to do that is through an accumulator, or through betting on something that’s a real longshot – think Leicester winning the Premier League, it was a 3000/1 probability. And realistically, people don’t want long-shots, and they want an accumulator that will give them better odds.

Right now for US sports, to get odds like that you have to do it across different events, meaning that bettors will end up gambling on a number of events that they probably don’t care that much about. But they need to bet on them to get a return. So while multis may sound like a small thing, it can allow players to pick five or six permutations and potentially receive a really large payoff on my game. And that, for me, is giving the customer what they want. For me, this will be a gamechanger.

Outside of the US, ease of access is something that will become a big focus. What COVID has done is made people transact a lot more online. And I think that it is also shown that we collectively as consumers get very poor experiences. There have been a number of times when I’ve tried to buy something online, and you’re either blocked, or the link doesn’t work.

I think as consumers, we’re not getting service properly and real ease of use is very far off. In every single industry, there’s far more people who want to sell rather than customers who want to buy. And I do think that we’ve collectively learnt that people will begin to demand more of a good user experience. And I feel that the brands in the betting and gaming space really think actually, we have got to make our service easy to use, we have got to make it easy to register. I don’t mean to say it’s not easy for us, the happy path is perfect. But anything at all deviates from that happy path is going to fall off.

Which operator has impressed you the most in 2020?

That’s a difficult question on the basis that most operators are our customers, but I do think that in the US, FanDuel has done amazing things in 2019 and 2020 to find their groove and find its drive. The stats and the market numbers show how well they’ve done, and we’re very happy to partner with them.

I think outside the US, it’s a very difficult question to answer. Because I think every brand and every operator is doing great things at the minute and the bigger brands are powering ahead.

GVC have just worked with us and we’ve helped them to launch their own platform that brought their customers on to their own platform for Ladbrokes and Coral. So I think that’s been great to see how they’ve done that. It’s also very interesting to see the brands of Paddy Power Betfair and Sky now under the Flutter Entertainment group, I think they’re doing some great things. It’s a difficult one when you talk about customers outside of the US because it’s an ultra ultra ultra competitive market.

What partnership has stood out in the past 12 months?

In terms of partnerships, we’ve done some partnerships with eSports providers and virtual sports providers. We’ve been able to get customers live within a couple of weeks, and I think it shows the essence of what a partnership should be like.

For example, we’ve got a virtual sports product that mimics real racing and it’s called Legends Racing. It takes the horses from right back to history and randomly picks a horse from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and mixes them up in a race with the true stats of each of these horses.

And the second we went into lockdown, we worked with a partner and said ‘let’s bring this’ because people still want to flutter, they still want to bet. There were more bets on the Virtual Grand National than there were on the real event for some customers two years ago. We’re an entertainment industry. Because of lockdown, people can’t go out to restaurants, there’s not that much on TV, you’ve watched Tiger King, you’ve watched Downton Abbey, you’ve binged everything on Netflix. But people just want to have something live. And so they’ve really shown how valuable our industry is to customers, in a very responsible way, and from our perspective we’ve found that to be really important.

And so I think our partnerships with some of the suppliers on the virtual horse racing companies has been as a band on the other side with our partners like GVC, William Hill, who’ve launched these products. They really are the epitome of how partnerships should work. Previously, it would have taken six months before we even got the approval to do these things. But from first conversations, we’ve been able to make these products live within around three weeks.

Which parts of the conference agenda have caught your eye?

Over the last four months of lockdown, I’ve very much been focused on our customers and our people – we’ve got 1600 people spread across the world. So we’ve placed a big focus on the internal aspect of things and making sure that our people and customers are happy.

I’m looking forward to next week, raising my head above the parapet, to see what’s happening in the markets, how different people have coped with the current situation and being able to share those experiences. It’ll be interesting to see how people’s perceptions have changed over the four months since we went into lockdown and to find out where they’re seeing opportunities too.

I’ve spoken to a number of customers, and they’ve highlighted that now is the time when people who are good leaders step up and lead. And if now is the time when people need to lean on another person, operator, partner, now’s the time when people can stand up and be counted. What really came across in the agenda is that we’re in a different world, and the conference will give people a chance to see how everything has changed and what we can learn from it.