TXODDS is sponsoring Betting on Football 2018, the fifth edition of the largest international football and betting trade conference at Stamford Bridge.
Ahead of the 20-23 March event, we spoke to the company’s Commercial Manager Thomas McGrath about what he is looking forward to at #bofcon2018, which innovation he expects to capture the most attention in 2018, and who he is backing to lift the World Cup trophy in Russia.
SBC: What are you looking forward to at Betting on Football?
TM: There’s a few things on my agenda (outside of the networking drinks), particularly revolving around the legalisation of gambling in the US, so being able to attend a panel where Paris Smith will be present should be invaluable.
Unfortunately, it clashes with a fantastic looking line up in the Drake suite where they will be chatting about Football integrity, something which we are very proactive about here in TXODDS, and our partnerships with The Perform Group and GLMS back that up.
We also proudly sponsoring a talk revolving around trading on the Thursday, and the line-up of speakers are some of the leaders in the industry, so I am really looking forward to that.
SBC: What are you promoting at Betting on Football?
TM: Outside of our industry leading low latency push price feed, we have created a front-end tool to query our massive bank of data, and give bookmakers some perspective on their trading practices across all the competitions they cover, and compare themselves to the industry and what their rivals are doing in a pre-play and in play environment.
This tool allows you compare overrounds, suspensions, market uptime, and so on. We have partnered up with TIBCO to provide us with some front-end visualisation for all this data.
To complement this, we have also done some extensive modelling and research on Football competitions covered by major Asian Sportsbooks, and this has enabled us to put some context as to what a potentially volatile game or league is, and notify or alert you when suspicious patterns arise.
These volatility alerts will allow sportsbooks trade with confidence, and potentially increase the competitions they cover.
SBC: What industry innovation will capture the most attention in 2018?
TM: There’s some pretty cool things popping up lately, Algosport have created a really nice feature for SSBT machines that I can see being very popular, TPD’s horse racing data looks extremely impressive and hopefully can be utilised. Aside from that, I am really enjoying the prop betting and request a bet markets that have materialised of late.
The benefits to the betting companies are obvious and it adds a fun or an ‘I knew that would happen’ element to the end user. There are numerous external suppliers of this product, but the one that has impressed me the most has been Banach Technology’s version of build a bet, which sees it go in play, and span the entire length of the betting market, which should be a total game changer.
SBC: How can your company help to improve the customer experience ahead of the World Cup?
TM: I think the benefits, and the value added by TXODDS speaks for itself. Our price feed will allow you trade with the utmost confidence, knowing that it’s low latent nature pushes your prices from the biggest and most liquid books in the industry, in the quickest possible time.
Our pre-event pricing will allow you to automatically ensure that you are in line with direct competition and help you run any marketing campaigns that you may be thinking of doing. Our market intelligence product will allow you to look back at previous World Cups, and how you traded them in running in comparison to your competitors, and also help you look at market uptime on a whole to ensure you’re offering prices for as close to the duration of a game as possible.
Our TXLAB will allow you to model historical games, so that you’re pricing is ahead of your competitors, and to round it all off our volatility feed will give you the confidence to trade any subsidiary or low liquid competitions that run during the world cup, so you can offer as close to 24/7 Football as possible.
SBC: Who are you backing to win the tournament, and why?
TM: Quite boringly I’m going to go with the old reliable – Germany. Defending champions, they have such a good squad, mentally they are freakishly strong and knowing that they’ve reached at least the quarter finals of every World Cup since 1978, you should get a good run for your money. I’m also having a small speculative bet on Croatia at 40/1 and also Egypt and Costa Rica to qualify from their groups.