Turnkey and white-label sportsbook provider Altenar has doubled down on its efforts to improve player engagement and retention for customers this year. With the launch of an intriguing line-up of new tools, including their Bet Boost, Rewards System and Proprietary Bet Acceptance product, Alejandro Cazorla, Sales Manager at Altenar, provides insights into why operators should focus on increasing customers’ lifetime value as the price of acquisition continues to rise.

Why did Altenar decide to focus so heavily on their engagement tool offering this year?

In today’s highly competitive iGaming markets, sportsbook operators must constantly differentiate themselves to attract players. With a number of sportsbooks demonstrating how high costs associated with building their player base can eat into profits, one crucial strategy to combat this is integrating innovative engagement tools that have the power to cross-sell, retain and onboard new players. With the average acquisition costs increasing year over year, these tools are essential to not only enhance the overall player experience but also drive customer loyalty, increase revenue, and foster an engaged audience.

Engagement tools play a pivotal role in creating a more personalised experience for sportsbook users, with widgets such as Altenar’s Bet Boost enticing them to try new markets. By offering a variety of these features, operators can captivate players and even encourage online casino customers to give sports betting a try. Engagement tools have the power to transform a sportsbook into a dynamic platform.

Keeping players engaged during quieter periods and securing their custom during highly competitive sporting events is essential for profitability. How does the Bet Boost widget achieve this?

Tools that enable operators to highlight certain odds and boost winning potential can help drive higher revenues. Our Bet Boost widget enables operators to enhance odds to a selected level for promotional purposes during major events, or to combat losses during quieter periods, to increase bettor engagement. Boosts can be applied automatically or manually within events and provide flexibility and customisation options.

We developed Bet Boost to enhance competitiveness in the industry, particularly for popular events. By offering boosted odds that significantly increase prizes on specific selections, this tool creates excitement and provides players with the opportunity to win larger payouts. This, in turn, can lead to increased betting activity and higher revenues for our sportsbook partners. Additionally, the tool’s flexibility allows operators to target specific events or markets, tailoring promotions to suit the local audience.

Friction in the user experience can cause even the most loyal customer to become frustrated. How is Altenar combating this?

Most people are familiar with the feeling of having something in their online shopping basket, only for it to refresh and become unavailable. This is a bugbear many bettors have faced with their bet slips, only to get to their final bet and see the odds refresh, forcing them to start over again. With the new Proprietary Bet Acceptance tool, Altenar has created their own algorithm to allow operators to determine the odds and tackle this frustrating hurdle for customers. This limits friction in the wagering process and gives operators an automated technology with which to determine whether to honour the previous odds available or continue to refresh the bet slip if the risk is too high.

Anticipation is a feeling commonly associated with online casino players. How can operators recreate this emotion for the sports-betting vertical?

The feeling of anticipation and reaching rewards is a familiar and welcome experience for online casino players, with progress bars and promotional tools encouraging longer or more frequent gaming sessions. With the introduction of our new Rewards System, Altenar takes bonuses to the next level by offering players a chance to win a progressive prize from a pool.

Operators can decide when the jackpot is hit, for example if a certain footballer scores during a game, or if the prize pool reaches a predetermined amount. The winnings can go to a single bettor, or smaller prizes may be shared between multiple players. The promotional tool is configured by the operator and is a powerful cross-selling tool, offering familiarity to casino-only players.

European Gaming talks to Liam Mulvaney, Founder of Bigly.

Bigly is the latest studio to have launched into what is a hugely competitive space. What makes you stand out from the crowd?

You’re absolutely right when you say this is a crowded market. Today, there are more than 750 studios providing in excess of 38,000 games to operators and players. But Bigly is not just another game studio. We will be producing thrilling and entertaining content for our partners and their players, but we are positioned to be much more than just a content provider. We consider ourselves a marketing studio that happens to provide assets in the form of slots.  Our unique commercial model means operators can access our games for a reliable and predictable cost, which in turn means they can ramp up marketing activity behind the titles that best meet the preferences of their players AND keep the lion’s share of the revenue each game generates. As costs rise and margins fall, Bigly is exactly what operators need to ensure sustainable success.

Tell us more about your unique commercial model.

So Bigly allows operators to access content for a capped monthly fee instead of the standard commercial model used by other studios where they work to a revenue share format. For the operator, this means if a game performs well, they hand a significant chunk of the revenues generated back to the studio. This ultimately has a knock-on effect as to the games that operators push to players and how they allocate marketing resources – this is why you often see the same slots from the same providers at the top of casino lobbies or used for promotional activity. But with our commercial model, which is sort of hybrid between a revenue share and a fixed cost system, operators have much greater flexibility over the games they give top lobby positions to, and how they market those games to players. Of course, they also know that if the game performs well, they get to keep the majority of the revenues made.

How does Bigly’s commercial model help operators beyond cost savings on content?

Our vision is to provide more opportunities for operators to push their own brand rather than Bigly. A quick example is that Bigly will not brand our games’ loader screens, but operators are free to feature their own logo if they wish. This means more brand presence from the operators. With Bigly, operators and their marketing teams can get super creative with their campaigns knowing the cost of accessing the game (or games) is fixed so the better the game performs, the more money the casino makes. In fact, the bolder the casino is in its marketing activity, the bigger the returns they will likely enjoy.

How do operators access your content?

There are a couple of ways. The first is directly through our remote game server, which is provided by our technical partner, Reelsoft. This is our preferred method of integration as it allows us to foster incredibly strong relationships with our operators while ensuring the smooth and seamless delivery of our content into markets across the world. Operators will also be able to get our games through aggregation platforms although the commercial relationship will be with Bigly – the aggregator will simply be a technical partner in the same way that Reelsoft is. This approach allows us to offer our content – and unique commercial model – to operators in the vast majority of jurisdictions from the get-go.

How does this approach to commercials and your wider business model benefit Bigly?

It gives us a major point of difference from the 100’s of other studios in the market, that’s for sure. And there’s something nice about bringing a product to the market that disrupts the status quo and genuinely revolutionises a major part of the industry. Ultimately, our approach and commercial model mean that we can provide the games and financials that operators are seeking, and, over time, this will see us become a major player in the content provision space. Of course, our approach works both ways – while our games are a predictable cost for our partners, they are a predictable income for Bigly and this really helps when it comes to establishing, growing and future-proofing the business. This can be really tough for new studios given the competitive nature of the market and the need for their games to be played at scale which of course requires top lobby positions and operator marketing activity, both of which are hard to secure for a new developer.  It is important to note that the vision of this studio is for this approach to be the lifetime model for Bigly, a new way of selling and consuming content.

Your USP is your commercial model, but what about your games?

Our games are a crucial piece of the puzzle. Our commercials can be super attractive, but if our games are tosh then players just won’t play them. This is why I’ve been tapping into my extensive network to assemble an incredible team of designers, mathematicians, developers, testers and so on, as we will live or die by the quality of our content. The first games of a studio are always tough but we are confident that our slots will hit the mark in terms of quality and playability. Our first slot is Deep Sea Treasure and takes the cascading reels format, with symbols tumbling as players dive into the underwater abyss in search of big wins. I’ll be giving people a sneak peek at the SBC Summit in Lisbon, so flag me down if you want to see it in action.

European Gaming talks to Andy Rogers, the Founder and CEO of Rokker.

Can you tell us more about RokkerX and the services you offer?

RokkerX is the managed services arm of Rokker, a professional services company that has been supporting tier-one operators and suppliers since 2015. We currently have a team of 60 incredible people and are on track to grow to 150 employees by the end of 2025. Our teams are based out of hubs across the globe including the UK, Spain and Bulgaria (Sofia) with plans to open a South American office by the end of the year. We are also closing on a deal for another 1,000 square meters of office space in Sofia so that we can meet client demand. In terms of services, when RokkerX debuted in 2023 we started with trading and operations but have just added a trio of services including customer service; KYC, ALM, fraud and payments; and player retention.

Who are your services mostly aimed at?

The end client is always a B2C operator but where we currently see the most interest is specifically from those wanting more control over their operations but who are less likely to want to take these services from a whitelable supplier. We also have several channel partners that deliver our services to operators including platform providers; we are always working to grow our roster of B2B partners with new companies coming on board all the time.

Talk us through your new services and how they help operators.

For KYC, AML, fraud prevention and payments, we provide a fully integrated solution that streamlines player onboarding and payments while ensuring compliance at all times. Operators – and indeed software suppliers – can tap into our expertise in these areas to be fully confident they are being managed to the highest standards of accuracy and security.

For example, we handle KYC and AML checks seamlessly to reduce the time and effort needed to verify players while ensuring full compliance with local and international regulations. Our fraud prevention services add an extra layer of protection, safeguarding operators from risks while optimising payment processes to ensure smooth, fast and secure transactions for both deposits and withdrawals. By allowing RokkerX to take on the complexities of these services, operators can focus on their core business while mitigating operational risk and meeting regulatory standards.

For us, the push into these new areas means we have a more comprehensive suite of services for operators which provides them with the flexibility to scale and focus on strategic growth while we take care of operational and regulatory demands.

Were there any other drivers for increasing your service offering?

We have seen strong demand for these services and, to us at least, there didn’t seem to be a simple independent solution out there. Sure, operators can take these services from whitelable suppliers, but many operators now want more control over their technology by buying or leasing their core stack – some have even built their own. These operators really need an experienced partner to help launch and run this part of their operation and that’s where we come in.

Independence is important to us, too. We are not tied to one platform, and this means we can be contextual and responsive to clients. We’ve all heard stories about player data being blurred or ownership of that data being held with providers – this is not our philosophy at all. With RokkerX, clients are segregated across our systems with all player data, brand scripting, and specific performance data and retention strategies, owned by the client at all times.

What challenges are operators facing in these areas and how do you help to overcome

them?

One of the biggest challenges operators face – especially those with multiple brands in multiple markets – is managing large teams while keeping a sharp focus on strategic business objectives. With RokkerX, operators can relieve some of the operational burden such as managing large teams and instead focus on driving their companies forward. Our ability to scale our service provision to 24/7 coverage means we can provide this support regardless of the magnitude of ambition or scale of capacity required.

The quality of the experience offered is also a challenge and we help our partners maintain the highest levels of service to their customers. We do this by leveraging economies of scale and as we continue to work with more operators, our clients benefit from a more experienced and cost-effective workforce when compared to managing everything in-house. This is another area of concern for operators, with accessing and onboarding skilled talent harder than ever before, especially in areas typically prone to high churn such as customer support.

Through our innovative talent solution, we offer a pathway for talented individuals to return to clients’ businesses as educated team members, minimising churn risks internally while maximising the value of their experience as they are specifically trained in the client’s systems and processes. In addition, our Learning and Development platform supports this by transforming typical pain points into opportunities and long-term benefits which in turn makes talent retention and development an asset rather than a challenge.

What makes RokkerX different to other companies providing the same services?

We are the only company that provides such a broad scope of services while being fully independent – most of our competitors focus on one or two of the areas we cover. So that’s our real USP – offering services to the market that are very underserved by companies who don’t make you take their platform alongside it, as is the case with most whitelable providers. This one-stop-shop approach allows us to provide holistic data across our services which in turn offers an additional layer of insight that can inform and guide other areas of our clients’ operations such as product and even marketing.

How will you further scale the business over the next 12 months and beyond?

We plan to rapidly scale in line with our growth trajectory and market demand – this includes scaling our team and adding more hubs. This scaling will not only increase our capacity but allow us to stay agile and responsive to the needs of our clients and partners. We are especially excited about our plans for South America where we are establishing a dedicated team and hub. This serves two purposes – one, to ensure we continue to expand and two, to align our teams and services even more closely with the aspirations and operations of our customers. This will reinforce our ability to provide contextual, client-focused solutions, helping both our business and our partners achieve their long-term goals. In short, if they win, we win.

You’ve scaled your operations in Sofia. Can you tell us more about this and what makes it such as good base for RokkerX?

Sofia has proved to be a great location for us – this should be no surprise as it’s become a really popular destination for iGaming businesses. Why? Because the city offers a dense talent pool and is a hub for related services and businesses. For us, the location provides the perfect foundation for further expansion, especially because of its time zone alignment and proximity to many of our clients. This allows for incredible operational efficiency while staying closely connected to our customers and their needs. The high-quality multi-lingual talent in Bulgaria has also been instrumental in delivering exceptional service to our clients – service we have built our reputation on.

What are your plans for South America?

Latin America is one of the most exciting markets right now, especially with Brazil coming online next year. For us, we see Brazil and the entire region as a significant opportunity and are actively targeting the region with our services – there is strong demand for our managed services and experience, especially as more markets embrace regulation. We are already in advanced talks with operators and partners, and the next run of industry events will be pivotal in further strengthening our presence in this exciting, rapidly evolving market.