GGB Podcast with Sarah Robertson

Yeah, really thanks for having me. I'm very excited to be in Vegas after some time.

Yeah, so I'm Canadian. I live in London now. I moved over to London when I joined Kambi. But my background is in business. I did an undergraduate degree from the University of New Brunswick on the east coast and a graduate degree from McGill in Montreal.

Yeah, I actually started working in gaming right after university. I don't want to age myself here, but I've been working in gaming for quite a few years. I started my career at a company in Montreal called Income Access, and they do... so you do your work for... I'm forgetting her name, Nikki Senior, thank you. Yes, I worked very closely alongside her for many years. So I worked there just around seven years doing business development and sales there as well. Obviously with affiliate technology, you get a really great overview of the full ecosystem, so I understood that I wanted to continue to work in gaming. Ultimately, Income Access was acquired by Paysafe Group, so I stayed on and worked a little bit across both Income Access and Paysafe Group for a little while. Then in 2018, PASPA had been repealed, and I identified that there was definitely going to be a niche market for me to springboard into sports betting, considering my understanding from Income Access. So I ended up taking a job with Kambi. They offered me a job to go and do sales in Europe but focusing on North America, because at that time we actually didn't have a U.S. office. We've since obviously opened up quite an extensive office, and I've been working at Kambi for just over three years now.

That's a great question. It was really kind of an exciting space in Montreal at the time, and it was something where there were a lot of young people working. I really like technology sales, so even at that stage before PASPA repeal, I understood that there was a great opportunity for a lot of growth in the gaming sector. The gaming sector is obviously very diverse, there's a lot of opportunities, and it's really fast moving, so that's really what drove me to that initially. Yeah, and that's why we're all in it, because it's a very exciting industry to be in. And I would say from a technology standpoint, ultimately I think gaming is at the forefront of a lot of technology in a lot of ways, especially sports betting. So that's what really drew me to Kambi. Working from an affiliate perspective, you're at a surface level of what the ecosystem looks like, whereas where Kambi is in the value chain, you actually have a lot of different touch points at different parts of the value chain. So that was really interesting for me, looking at data flows, looking at how we build software, how we make that software available to end users by our operator partners. It's been really interesting to learn over the last few years.

Nikki was definitely actually my original mentor, Nikki and Seraphina, Gabriel, who also works at Income Access and Paysafe now. They were both two big women in gaming that were really instrumental in my development at Income Access, and I think they really gave me a lot of the tools to help me succeed as a business development executive in gaming as a woman. So yeah, I would say those are two great influences. Then ultimately, working at Kambi, I work really closely with our executive team and our EVP of Business Functions, Cecilia, is probably one of my current mentors, because she's a really great influence to see where you can take your career from an executive level in gaming.

Yeah, I mean that's a great question. I would say I think that there's unlimited possibilities in gaming. You really need to find what interests you and find good mentors. I think that really helped me develop what I wanted to do as a young person out of school. I didn't go in with the intention of wanting to focus on business development or sales, but I really found my skill set in that, and that was helped by mentorship. There's a lot of great women in gaming who offer up time to other young women in gaming to help develop skill sets and to help understand the gaming space. So I would say start somewhere, start anywhere. Ultimately in today's day and age, you can change focus and direction, and like I said, gaming gives you a really great playing field to find what works for you.

Yeah, we're I think we have just around 30 partnerships that we maintain, and I think a large portion of our business now comes from the North American market. That's really the core focus of a lot of our business now, focused on North America. Obviously up to the last three years in the U.S., but now also looking at Canada as a market as Ontario opens up. And I would say over the last three years we've built out our team. In the U.S., we have quite a large office, it's our fastest growing office in Philadelphia, and we've got a small sales team located in the U.S. as well. So I think the next few years are going to prove to be very exciting. We're seeing a huge plethora of new states legalizing all at once, so it's almost a keep-up-to-pace at this stage. And ultimately we're experiencing a lot of great partnerships that are moving multi-state and continuing to enter into new states, so we'll continue to support those partners as they grow throughout the U.S.

Yeah, so we are kind of a little unique in the market in that we give our operator partners an end-to-end solution, and we basically package that solution up and make it available via mobile applications, web applications, and in the terminals that you see in casinos or other gaming venues. What we do in that service is end to end, from odds compiling, actually setting the lines and doing all the pricing, we do all the risk management but customize risk management so that we offer unique solutions to our partners. We do all the technical sportsbook, the engine that sits below the surface that people don't realize is a very complex piece of technology when you think about the level of data that flows through a sportsbook. It's very extensive. Then we package it up to different UI so that people can consume it in the way they want to consume it, because ultimately we recognize that our partners all have very different unique strategies. They're looking at how to create a differentiated experience across UI and UX, or with pricing, or with anything, and how they want to drive their strategy to be different from their competitors. So we've spent a lot of time and effort over the last several years to make sure we allow that big flexibility on differentiation, and that's something we'll continue to focus on as we build out our product. And I think the main thing we're talking about this year at G2E is we've spent a lot of time developing what we're calling Game Parlay, which is the ability to create in-event combinations or combine bets within an event. We've just released that for NFL, and it's proving to be a really popular product. I think what differentiates it from some of the other similar products on the market is that we built this from the ground up in our technology, so we haven't just taken it as an add-on product. We've built it from the ground up, so that gives the consumer the ability to really combine anything in a sportsbook. You can come in, build your bet within the match in NFL, and you can add on an MLB bet, so it's kind of limitless. From a consumer perspective, the feedback we're getting is that this is a big deal for having ultimate freedom, and ultimate freedom is something we really strive towards for our consumers.

Ultimately we let the books balance themselves, and we give the true probability of the odds, and then we manage the risk through our risk management solution. So it's really up to the operator what they want that liability to look like, so it's really on an operator basis.

Yeah, well interestingly, I think we get that question quite a bit. We are a global sports betting supplier, and what's actually become really fruitful from being a global supplier is that different sports are popular in different territories. And what Kambi's been able to do, coming from a European background, an Australian background, from all the different geos that we service, which are very many and very diverse, that's actually allowed us to build a really great long tail offering. So it's not just about the breadth of market, we offer all the different sports, but then it's the depth of those markets, all the different unique specials, the instance, the player props, all the things that our in-house team are able to develop and trade. That's what really gives us a competitive advantage. And I think now we've built out a really capable team across U.S. sports. We've got a lot of U.S. traders located in our Philly office, and I think we're just going to continue to strengthen our offering.

Yeah, I think for Kambi, what gives us a competitive advantage is that we are a sports-only company. We don't do iCasino, we don't do platform, we don't do payments. We really have a laser-focused vision, and it's for sports. Our sportsbook was actually developed by sportsbook enthusiasts, so our executives are all sportsbook enthusiasts. I think that gives us an advantage in that everything we do, all the way down to product development and trading, is always focused with the end consumer in mind. And I think that gives us the focus to get the best product to the market. As you can see, there's a lot of consolidation happening right now in the space, and we see a lot of B2B suppliers being owned by B2C suppliers. And that to me muddies focus. We are B2B only, we are focused on delivering a good product, we're not focused on acquiring customers, we're not focused on marketing our own name. We're focused on our operators and their end users, and I think that speaks for itself.

Yeah, I think we have some tribal operators that we're currently working with. We're working with Seneca in New York and Four Winds in Michigan. We really value the opportunity to work with tribal operators, because in a lot of markets they are at the forefront of what they want to do in the gaming space. Ultimately, what Kambi gives to our tribal partners is the ability to utilize the Kambi sportsbook, maintain control of their customer database, and leverage the brand names they've cultivated in their markets. In a lot of instances, tribes want to have maximized profit to give back to their communities, and they want control of that database. They've built up great databases through their land-based casino properties, and they don't necessarily want to hand those over to someone else to own. So Kambi gives that flexibility if they should choose to go that route. And I notice there's a lot of First Nations in Canada getting into sports. Yes, so I think Canada is going to be a really exciting market. Obviously we're very keenly watching as regulations move forward in Ontario, and we're keenly looking at what the other provinces will do. I think Canada will continue to be a focus for Kambi.

Yeah, esports. We have a dedicated in-house team trading esports, so it's long been a focus of ours. We've also just acquired an esports company called Abios, located in Sweden, where we hope to create synergies to really build out our esports offering, utilizing some of the developments their teams are working on and their knowledge around trading esports. We think that acquisition is going to create a lot of synergies and allow us to be market leading in esports as well, because we do see that as a big focus moving forward.

Yeah, so we actually, as part of our service, handle the data relationships. We work with all the large data providers like Sportradar, Genius Sports, etc., and we basically contract on behalf of our network operators and work with them to give a market leading product. We have a team that handles those relationships in-house, and that's built into the offering we give to our operators. We handle those relationships for them, because as you can imagine, the data space right now is very fast moving and very complex, so that's something we've decided to build into part of our service.

That typically sits at the operator or platform level, but it's something that we help facilitate with all the data-driven APIs we give. We give open-source APIs to our operators, we have data warehouse integration, so that they have all the transactional data from the sportsbook to ensure they're running a responsible book and keeping the consumer in mind. So we have integrations that help support that.

I really would hope to accelerate my career at Kambi. I'm really enjoying my time at Kambi, and I think sports betting is such a great, fast-paced industry right now. I definitely want to stay laser focused in this space. I think there's a lot of growth opportunities in Kambi over the next few years, so I'm really hoping to find my way and continue my path.