Interviews
Exclusive Interview: Jonathan Power, Founder and MD of Voxbet
European Gaming talks to Jonathan Power, Founder and MD of Voxbet, about the company’s rise to prominence in the sports betting space and making waves in genuine innovation with its latest betting microphone for sportsbooks.
What was your industry background before you started Voxbet as Onionsack in 2006?
My background was in fintech. My co-founders and I had a background in modernising banking tech for the big UK and Irish banks in the 1990s. We did that until the mid-2000s, and I was always very keen to have my own gig. I wanted to enable something that would enable people to conduct value transactions by text message. This was before the smartphone, but we built a platform that could prove it was you who sent the message. We came up with a number of applications for that technology, but the target was fintech and person-to-person payments.
What I knew from my experience with fintech was that the banks won’t touch anything that hasn’t been proven in another industry. We did a few things. We had person-to-person payments, share trading, we offered the buying of concert tickets, but we chose sports betting. You could make a bet by writing what you would write on a betting slip and sending it in a text message. We would read the text message and know who you are. If it was a high-value transaction, we would prove it was you that sent it by calling you back and taking a print of your voice.
I took a punt that the betting industry would try something like that. I went to a trade show in November, and we went live with the Tote in the UK the following June. It was a time when you could get things done. I never left the industry, and even though I say I’m from a fintech background, I’m actually more from a sports betting background now, in terms of years served.
Did yourself and your partners know much about the sports betting space going into it?
I did as a punter, but I didn’t know who to talk to. I took a stand at a trade show and we did well out of it. From there, we did deals with William Hill and Paddy Power, so we built a nice little business out of that. Smartphones then made text betting quite niche quite quickly, but people who bet with us via text in 2006 still do that with us now. We made a massive pivot (in branding terms, more so than technologically) to move into voice betting about a year-and-a-half ago, and we’ve been Voxbet ever since.
With text betting, what would a supplier offer as opposed to an operator saying “text us on this number”?
We would have read the message and understood it. Everybody is uniquely identifiable by their phone number, so we would know it was you, we would know you had the device in your hand, and what it is you wanted. There was about an 80% chance we could read the message and place the bet automatically, before sending you back confirmation, and there was about a 20% chance we wouldn’t understand it with 100% certainty; in which case we needed a call centre agent to bring some human intelligence to the interaction. That’s the platform which is up and running and it’s still used in a number of places, but it’s not what we’re presenting to everyone now. Everything now is all about voice.
When it came to the voice tech, what did your research tell you about what was missing in that space and were many other suppliers offering it at the time?
There were two things we noticed. The first is that tens of billions of dollars are being spent on voice by big tech companies. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and IBM all have massive products in the voice space and have spent tens of billions acquiring companies in that space. They have made a huge bet on the future of interacting digitally being voice.
The other factor is an awareness that there’s so much content on the sports betting side now. When sports betting sites first went online, it was more or less taking the shop coupon and putting it on a web page; it was that simple. When Google launched in 1997, there were two million websites in the world; there are now two billion. One sports betting site now offers more than two million things you can bet on, but there was still a way of navigating things before Google entered the scene, where you would go through layers and layers of menus. That’s a poor user experience and it’s not an experience for people other than existing gamblers who have had no choice but to use that system. Young people won’t use it like that. If Spotify was laid out the way a sports betting site is laid out, nobody would use it; it would be unusable. People are used to getting what they want everywhere else online.
This wasn’t something sports betting suppliers had tried before, and it actually turned out to be much more difficult than we expected. We thought we could plug into the existing engines like Google and IBM. They work really well to about 90%, but then they apply artificial intelligence which can change what a customer is saying to something that they didn’t say. Sporting parlance is quite unique. If I said to Google that I wanted a £20 treble on Liverpool, Leeds and Coventry, it will say you want £20 travel to those places! That’s actually a benign example and there are some brand-damaging examples. It’s not the sort of thing you could launch with the kind of mistakes those engines can make, so we’ve had to adapt to that and come up with something specific to sport.
How did you go about creating the technology that could iron out those issues you mention?
We knew an awful lot about sports betting language from our text betting days. We started out on the assumption that if you could understand a bet which is expressed in words, you could understand a spoken bet. But as I say, it did turn out to be more of a challenge than we thought it would be.
The way we have fixed that problem is by creating a dictionary where the only thing that dictionary understands is sporting terms, and we recompile that dictionary every hour, based on which events are on. We’re working on the assumption you won’t bet on something today that starts in a week’s time, and the universe of what you’re trying to understand becomes too complex if you look too far ahead. I’d say 99% of our traffic is for events happening soon. If it’s not accessible by voice, it’s still accessible the old way. You can make the problem much smaller if you say people are betting in this space right now, and then you recompile the language to be relevant to sports betting in this moment. If you keep recompiling it, it will then be phenomenally fast and accurate.
Does this work just as well then if I want to bet on a complex Betbuilder as much as a single match?
It’s working on racing at the moment, and it will do anything up to the most complicated place bot in one hit. You can say ‘£5, place bot,’ and call out all your horses. The target is to eventually include Betbuilders. Once we can do that on horse racing, we will know we can do it on other sports as well.
So how many sports can it work for right now and what sports are you planning to expand to?
In English, the rollout will be in three phases. The first is for horse racing, which is ready to go. The second is for football, which we’re working on, and the third phase is everything else.
How significant could this be for operators, in terms of the percentage of bets that could be placed this way?
That’s something we will begin to understand after we launch. We’re working on an integration in Asia, and in the UK, it will launch before Cheltenham. We don’t know yet, but what we do know from our text betting metrics is that the people who want the easiest way of betting are the people who bet a lot. The average user of a betting app might bet 12-15 times per month. The average user of text betting in France for example bets 160 times per month. Simplicity appeals to those who interact a lot with sportsbooks, and they’re very important customers who are currently poorly served by having to do a lot of digging.
Are you particularly looking at younger demographics within the serious bettor demographic?
We’re after two key demographics. The first is more important in value terms rather than volume terms, so for those who know what they want, we want to give them an easier journey. The second cohort is younger people who engage digitally with their voice every day already. They use interfaces like Spotify and TikTok, and have never had to navigate something like a sportsbook, so that’s a key market for us as well.
Would I need to be logged into the app to use the voice technology?
The intention with our bet mic is that you’re inside the app. We give operators a widget that they can put on their homepage. You press and hold the microphone, say what you want and let go. That then brings you to the betslip.
How compatible would that be then with something like Alexa?
Alexa won’t work for this. It was something we looked into. We did demos on it and it looked impressive when it worked, but the problem at the moment is that Amazon will translate what a customer said to Alexa, and it just gives you the transcript. Amazon has to do that without any context of what you said, so it’s actually phenomenally impressive that it comes even close, but most of the time, it doesn’t come close enough. You can get it to work, but it doesn’t work at a high enough level of accuracy. At the moment, I would say ours will work 99% of the time and produce exactly what you said. It becomes much simpler when you have context, but that means you can’t use tools like Siri and Alexa, because they work without context.
How challenging will it be to get across to people that this is a different way to bet from what people are used to? How will you change people’s mindset and make this the first thing they think to do with a betting app?
People of my age learn from younger people. I see my children do something and then I start doing it. It’s partially going to be down to operators to get it across to their customers that there’s an easier way of doing things. When you see a microphone, you tend to know what it’s for. If you see a microphone on the homepage of a sportsbook, you will wonder if you can just speak your bet.
The likes of Waterhouse VC have invested in your business. What has that investment been used for specifically and are you still looking for further investment?
Industry heavyweights open doors and their evangelism is transformative to us as a company, because people really listen to them. We use the word ‘ubiquity’ 10 times a day, and that’s our target. We know that when the right innovation hits the industry, everybody wants it. That’s what happened with in-play betting, cashout and in-game multiples, and we think this is in the same category. Those investors can change this from being a niche product which a few people think is cool to something that will become ubiquitous. We’re not looking for further investment. We have a trading business with our text betting, and that’s something we will look at, but not right now.
What is their equity in the business?
A lot of deals like that these days are structured with underlying options. They’ve bought a small piece but they’ve got an option for a bigger piece. I’d advise any innovator to look at offering industry evangelists deals that are structured like that, because it means they’re not penalised for the value they create. They can buy more at the same value as when they joined the business, even when it’s worth significantly more. All of them have put their own money in.
Does their collective ownership come to around 10% or less than that?
I’d say collectively it’s around 10%, but they have options to go nearer to 20-25%.
What do you think really needs to improve in the area of voice technology and how will you take it on a level?
I think the big tech in this space is amazing and I wouldn’t want to be seen to be in any way critical of it, but they’re working without any context. If you use Google’s voice dictation, it’s phenomenally accurate, but it is having to do that without context. You’ve got so many things happening in a sportsbook, and even if you want to ask about events in the next three hours, it’s too much to ask Google to understand that model, because there’s too many terms.
I think the big tech engines aren’t sufficiently adaptable to customer-facing scenarios in a B2B sense, but the business knows the context. I could be at an insurance company, and I know when someone sends me a voicenote over WhatsApp, they’re going to be talking about making a claim or wanting a renewal. The amount of language that’s relevant in that scenario is a very small fraction of what they’re able to understand, but because they’re open to understanding everything, they get more wrong. I think the ability to configure their platforms for a very narrow context is what makes us different.
How many operators have you partnered with and how many will you go live with at Cheltenham?
We have one media company which we will go live with, and they work with 10 UK bookmakers, so there will be bets placed with this at up to 10 major UK bookmakers.
Going forward, which markets will you focus on?
English is a priority. Everybody wants to focus on the US, but for us, we are also focusing on the Chinese language. We’ve got our platform working for the Asian market, so if we can do that, we can do anything. English will be the priority, but our biggest customer is PMU in French, which is easy for us to do. We’re undecided but we will take the opportunities where they come. A new language requirement will take about a month for us to get it working.
Do you have a target for the number of sites you want to be live with in the next few years?
We want to be live on at least 100 sites in three years and want to be on almost every site within five years.
How will the technology evolve over the next few years to allow that to happen?
The voice technology that’s out there is good enough. It will really depend on whether operators want to offer a chat-style user interface, where a customer can say: ‘I want to bet and I fancy Liverpool to beat Spurs tonight. What will the price be if put 20 quid on that?’ That’s not our approach. We just want customers to say: ‘£20, Liverpool to win.’
The whole area of what’s happening with ChatGPT and AI could change what user experiences people want and how they want to engage. I think people want to engage with technology as though it’s technology and want to engage with people naturally. It would be sad if people wanted to engage with technology as though it’s a person, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.
Nik Robinson, CEO at Big Time Gaming, talks about the challenges studios face when it comes to sequel slots such as its just-launched Danger! High Voltage 2.
Congratulations on the launch of Danger! High Voltage 2. Tell us more about the game and what players can expect.
Thanks! We’re absolutely thrilled to launch Danger! High Voltage 2—it’s an electrifying sequel we think fans of the original will love. When we released the first Danger! High Voltage, the response was phenomenal, and players kept asking for even more high-octane action. So, we set out to turn things up to 11 with this release.
The game cranks up the excitement with our Megaways™ engine, giving players up to 117,649 ways to win on each spin. The base game is supercharged with volatility and powered by the MegaDozer, perched right above the reels, ready to drop Scatters, Wilds, Multipliers, and other electrifying surprises into play. Then there are the two fiery free spin bonuses—Fire in the Disco! and Danger Danger!!—designed to keep players on the edge of their seats.
And, of course, it wouldn’t be Danger! High Voltage without the unforgettable soundtrack by Electric Six! Get ready for some serious foot-tapping and headbanging because this game truly brings the heat.
How does the second instalment differ from the original Danger! High Voltage slot you launched back in 2017?
This time around, players are transported to an electrifying thrilling industrial scene, and introduced the groundbreaking mechanic MegaDozerTM mechanic sitting up top, ready to unleash Scatters, Wilds, Multipliers, and surprises.
It’s amazing to see how much slot game design has evolved since we launched the first game in 2017, and Danger! High Voltage 2 is a testament to that evolution. This time, we’ve built it around our Megaways™ engine, which amps up the gameplay with up to 117,649 ways to win on every spin.
We’ve also kept the player choice element for the Free Spins round, but we didn’t just stop there. Fire in the Disco! and Danger Danger!! are brand-new bonus features that make every spin a symphony of excitement. It’s a whole new level of Danger! and a thrilling way for players to experience just how far we’ve come in delivering cutting-edge slots.
What made the iconic song from Electric Six the perfect soundtrack for creating a slot game around?
When we set out to create Danger! High Voltage 2, we knew we had to keep the core essence that players loved—the name and that iconic Electric Six soundtrack—but from there, this game is a totally new beast.
It’s insanely catchy and the perfect soundtrack for spinning the reels. For me, it stirs a strong feeling of nostalgia, taking me back to the early 2000s when the song was riding high in the charts. The more I listened to it, the more I became convinced it would be huge fun to create a slot game around the song. The lyrics lend themselves to bonus features (Fire in the Disco! Danger Danger! Or the original High Voltage & Gates of Hell), and the disco theme works really well as an online slot because it is so visual and colourful. With the original, we were able to capture the essence of the song and bring it to life, which is why Danger! High Voltage became a runaway success. Danger! High Voltage 2 turns the volume up to the max and we fully expect it to rise to the top of the charts, just like the original did.
Just how hard is it to launch a follow-up to a hugely successful slot game? What are the main challenges in doing so?
Launching a follow-up to a hit like Danger! High Voltage is no easy feat—it’s a bit like making the sequel to a blockbuster movie. You need to build on the experience offered by the original game, keeping true to the core theme and gameplay while making sure it offers something new and different. Stick too close to the original and it won’t deliver the excitement players are seeking, move too far away from it and you can end up with a significant disconnect from the original. But we reimagined the visuals and mechanics, integrating our Megaways™ engine as it adds massive win potential with up to 117,649 ways to win and to keep the gameplay engaging. We took risks with a completely new mechanic MegaDozer™ and introduced two brand-new free spin features, Fire in the Disco! and Danger Danger!! which had to be meticulously tested to ensure they deliver the right blend of fun and volatility. It becomes a bit of a balancing act whereby you need to keep core elements the same or similar and then bring in new elements that take the whole package to the next level. It’s easy to see why the second album is often the toughest for musicians.
Big Time Gaming seems to have cracked the code when it comes to sequel slots with the recent launch of Bonanza Falls so you must have been able to overcome these challenges.
We’re fortunate to have such strong original titles like Bonanza and Danger! High Voltage as a foundation for our sequels, but make no mistake—it all starts with the team’s incredible work in crafting these iconic games in the first place. When you have a solid base, it gives us the freedom to innovate boldly. For instance, with sequels like Bonanza Falls and Danger! High Voltage 2, we introduced fresh mechanics like MegaDozer™, Win Exchange™, Bonus Coins, which add entirely new dimensions to gameplay. These features aren’t just updates; they’re true evolutions that deliver exhilarating experiences and keep players coming back.
Our team embraces these challenges head-on, bringing excitement and a touch of fun to every sequel we produce. And while these games build on the legacies of the originals, they’re crafted to stand tall on their own merits. Bonanza Falls and Danger! High Voltage 2 don’t just rely on the reputations of their predecessors—they’re outstanding games in their own right, designed to thrill players new and old alike. It’s about creating something fresh while capturing the magic that made the originals so beloved.
Match Hype has just won two industry competitions. Talk us through your product.
Match Hype brings engagement from social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram into the sportsbook. Our technology automatically turns raw sports data into short videos full of sports and betting insights. We have the capacity to create up to a million videos daily in more than 30 languages. We also provide hosting and streaming of the videos, and we track everything in the video thanks to our own player. The high level of video experience and the scale make us unique in the market, and we believe that this innovation is extremely needed in the industry—and the judges in the competitions probably agree with us.
What technologies are you leveraging to deliver such a cutting-edge tool/product?
We have more than six years’ experience in developing dynamic video solutions for clients like Microsoft, HBO, and SAP, and a decade in high-end video production for similarly well-known clients. Match Hype is the essence of this. We have developed our own robust cloud infrastructure that enables us to work on a huge scale. We can also leverage the integration of third-party solutions that help us make the video content rich and engaging. The AI boom came at the right time to help us make the experience for the viewer even better.
Who is Match Hype aimed at?
We focus mostly on sportsbook operators, where we think we can bring the biggest value. But we also have clients on the affiliate and media side. Our “competition” at the moment are creative professionals who are able to create one video at a time. To cover hundreds or thousands of events daily, you need huge manpower. With Match Hype, you don’t need that—it’s all automated. Anybody who appreciates this level of efficiency will benefit.
The end users are any sports fans who enjoy engaging videos. So basically everybody.
Has this industry been slow to embrace video content and unlock the potential it offers? If so, why?
It’s hard for us to talk about the whole industry, as we haven’t been part of it for that long. But iGaming feels like a conservative industry where only truly meaningful innovations make it. Fingers crossed for Match Hype being one of them. We are confident because of our track record in other industries, and mostly thanks to the results of our dynamic videos that are already used by significant igaming industry players.
What makes video content so effective at customer acquisition? How can Match Hype be used in this regard?
People just love video content. In the last review, TikTok said that the average user spends around 90 minutes a day on their platform. Platforms like Spotify used to be music and podcasts only; now they are full of videos. You just can’t ignore that. Video killed the radio star, and a static sportsbook is next to die.
And what about retention? How can it be used to keep players engaged and coming back for more?
Imagine that a 30-second video gives you the exact insights to help you make a betting decision without spending dozens of minutes on different resources to gather all the information. People don’t want to read anymore. This is probably an even bigger strength of Match Hype than user acquisition.
What can we expect from Match Hype in the coming months?
We will establish Match Hype as an industry standard for dynamic video content. We’ll bring many more sports like tennis, basketball horse racing and. We are preparing real-time video use cases—for example, half-time updates in football—and new distribution channels like integration directly into streams. The potential is huge. Stay tuned.
Any final thoughts?
For the last year, we have talked with literally hundreds of iGaming experts, investors, and executives. Almost every one of them sees fan engagement as a huge topic in the upcoming months and years. And video will definitely play a key part in it.
Video says more than a thousand words. Give it a go—watch one of our 30-second videos and see for yourself.
Affiliate Industry
Flying high: How RavenTrack is helping operators unlock the true potential of their affiliate programs
We sit down with Adam Rowley, Managing Director at RavenTrack, to understand why data, tracking and optimisation are key to a successful affiliate program
Your tagline is “win at performance marketing”. Tell us more about how you help operators maximise their partnerships with affiliates.
It is indeed. RavenTrack is a powerful affiliate tracking solution that allows operators to track, optimise and grow through their affiliate programs. Our proprietary solution offers an advanced affiliate tracking platform built by iGaming experts – this ensures it meets the unique demands of the industry, including the need to withstand the pace and complexity of affiliate marketing in the online sports betting and casino space. RavenTrack has also been designed to be flexible and customisable so that it can be adapted to individual client requirements. This combination of qualities has seen us become the go-to affiliate software tracking provider for more than 150 brands across the world, brands that are winning at performance marketing with the support of RavenTrack.
Why is tracking so important to the ultimate success of an affiliate program?
Tracking is the glue that holds marketing and sales together in the online arena. But effective tracking requires a platform that delivers reliability, accuracy and a seamless UX so that users can easily dig into the data and generate valuable insights. Speed and reliability are crucial so that operators don’t miss a single click or conversion. To track data effectively, operators (and their affiliate partners) need tools such as pixel and postback capabilities and geo-targeting. The former allows affiliates to track customer activity in real time which helps them maximise the revenue of the brands they work with. When it comes to intelligent geo-tracking, it allows users to identify and aim to funnel traffic through specific locations.
But tracking is just one part of the process and success of an affiliate program– online sportsbook and casino operators must be able to take the data they have tracked and use it to optimise campaigns, both internally and those being run by their affiliate partners.
What does optimisation look like? How does RavenTrack help its customers do this?
Traffic source provides a lot of spoke for optimisation, especially when it comes to things like which affiliate is performing best, changes to traffic, ROI and conversion rate optimisation. With RavenTrack, operators have the insight they need to do this. They can also give their affiliates access to data via their own internal reporting systems – this is done via our two-way API – to help determine which campaigns and creatives are delivering the best results. Operators also need to optimise the commercial agreements they have in place with their affiliate partners, and this means being able to offer them a range of options including CPA, revenue share, CPL, CPM and hybrid.
As operators – and their affiliates – get more experienced at using data and tracking, they will want to customise reports to a pretty granular level so that they can optimise to a much deeper and greater extent. Customisable reports (we have more than 20 reports available), marketplace and dashboards are just a few of the tools we provide to help operators and affiliates optimise campaigns and work to the commercials that deliver for both parties.
And how does all of this come together to help both operators and affiliates scale at pace?
Our fixed-cost model means operators can create as many campaigns for their brands as they like without the worry of additional costs. This in turn makes growing their program pretty straightforward. With a long list of commission structures available (which can be customised by the client) for their affiliate partners, operators can ensure the growth of the program is reflected in the growth of the wider business, ultimately allowing them to maximise profitability from affiliate marketing activity while at the same time ensuring their partners are fairly compensated for the quality traffic they send.
Migrating to a new affiliate tracking platform can cause major upheaval. How do you help operators through the process?
We know that moving to a new platform can be a big decision and a significant undertaking, but we have plenty of options to make it a seamless process from start to finish. This includes working with the affiliate program team to run their old and new program side by side to ensure there is absolutely no drop-off in traffic or lost data. Our UK-based account and customer support team is always on hand to assist during the migration process, and once operators are up and running with RavenTrack – this includes helping them get the most out of our platform and tools.
RavenTrack has only been around for a handful of years but has already achieved great things. What can we expect in the months ahead?
We hit the market in 2018 and haven’t looked back. Today, we work with 150 brands, processing more than one billion clicks per month and £2billion in deposits to date. The operators using RavenTrack to run their affiliate programs have generated more than £500 million in revenue and counting. Our numbers speak for themselves and no matter the size of brand or affiliate program, our solution is the key to unlocking the true potential of affiliate marketing. As for the months ahead, expect more platform updates, new tools and some big-name partnership announcements.
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