Alea: sportsbook launch creates complete product offering for iGaming competitiveness

We are not simply casinos or sportsbooks, we are betting companies that must have a complete unified product offering to compete in the modern world. This is the belief of Alex Tomic, who is set to see the Alea product offering swell once again. A sportsbook solution is the latest addition to a company which was founded as an aggregator, the demand from which was largely driven by requests from a significant number of clients. Despite acknowledging that this step should have been made some time ago, Tomic – Alea’s founder – elaborates on what can be expected as a result of this latest move, operational advantages to be gained, how this complements a wider company expansion and much more. Becoming a money printing machine As a self-confessed casino guy and casino company stands poised to usher in its latest expansion, one question regarding the vision behind this move and what it means for the company stands clear. The answer, Tomic begins, is relatively simple. This primarily centres around sportsbook becoming a must have due to client demands, in addition to the necessity of possessing a higher volume of players. “There are many more sportsbook players than casino players, and they need to cross-sell as the CPA is much lower in sportsbook than in casino,” he comments. “We have many more players, and then, for example, through our agnostic jackpot tool, you can cross them from sportsbook to casino. “We’re going to launch it very soon, and we’re really looking forward to seeing what data we’re going to get from that, because we have a lot of data.” Alea is clearly expanding its product suite, with Alea Pay and Alea Jackpot previously revealed before this latest move into the sports domain was disclosed. When quizzed on how this evolution fits into the company’s broader strategy, Tomic points to a foundation of building the infrastructure. “At the beginning, we started integrating APIs of game providers,” he explains. “Then we built our own API and asked providers to integrate that, especially the new ones, because they were not very API savvy, and didn’t understand how they are important, as important as they are in the banking industry as we are the only industry where we’re paying out. “It can become a money-printing machine. We’ve seen a lot of hacks on these APIs, and it’s very important that we continue securing them, especially in the era of AI.” Should you ask AI to build or integrate an API, you run a significant risk of having one that’s exploitable. Tomic reiterates the necessity of securing a solid foundation, which can lead to numerous rewards being reaped. This centres around data collection and analysis, which can ultimately deliver a vast amount of advice, recommendations and conclusion to both Alea and its roster of partners. He continues: “On top of that, we are a meta experience builder. We build meta games. The first one is the jackpot. “There’s going to be a recommendation engine, a slots tournament, syndicated game play where people bet together or play against each other or both of them where they play in a team together against another. “It’s endless. You can then have a third layer of people that are betting on these teams. For example, you have five people playing together or against another five, and then you have another layer of people betting on team A or team B. It is completely endless. “It’s like Matryoshka’s or a hologram. The more you zoom, there is always something. It’s endless, in every way.” Why is now the time for sportsbook? We should have started much earlier, Tomic honestly confesses, despite acknowledging that the company perhaps did not possess the infrastructure and foundation that it has now grown to hold. With expansion ‘into a very big company’ having been witnessed, and a podium position of being ‘one of the top two or three aggregators in the world’, this was deemed the perfect time to think of sports betting. Despite this, you need to be well-prepared to execute before taking these steps, as Tomic elaborates: “A couple of years ago, we started live games. We didn’t know how to sell live games. We still don’t know today how to sell live games. Believe it or not, we’re not good at live games. “It’s not yet a significant amount of our business, neither are crash games. Each vertical requires not only to integrate it, but to to fully understand it to be able to sell it to your customers. “It’s not as easy as just integrating. Now we need to be careful to become a sportsbook specialist, while at the same time continuing to learn about live games, crash games, and whatever new verticals come into the market.” A strategic alliance with FIRST.bet will accompany this launch in a partnership deemed the perfect fit for the Alea ecosystem, in addition to being labelled as opportunistic. This was due to a significant number of customers specifically asking for them from the moment that the company entered the market. “A lot of our customers were asking for them and telling us ‘we don’t have the time to integrate all of them, we want to go to an aggregator,” Tomic notes. “That’s where you see a synergy or where two partners need each other. We have one partner that doesn’t have the time, nor the resources or the willingness to integrate all these customers, and you have an aggregator like us that has customers asking for this partner, because he’s the new cool kid on the block. That’s how this partnership rose.” A beautifully crafted feature These were the words used to describe the Alea Jackpot that debuted earlier this year, despite slight warnings from competitors regarding the difficulty of selling such products. However, regardless of still being in a soft launch phase and undertaking some fine tuning to maximise effectiveness, a noteworthy uptake has been witnessed. “We are integrating it right now with many customers,” Tomic comments. “We are extremely happy that a lot of customers are asking for it. “You’ve got this tool that you spent two to three years building, and then when you put in the customer website, it generates additional revenue. “You try to convince your other customers that there’s no setup fee or no minimum fee and that you’re just going to take a revenue share and still they don’t want to do it. “We’re very happy at Alea that our customers are very excited and motivated to take the jackpot.” You should not operate without a sportsbook For an operator already using Alea for traditional iGaming aggregation solutions, what is the biggest operational advantage of activating this new sportsbook layer through the same integration? To answer, Tomic points to personal experience of operating without a sportsbook. Upon this being added numerous advantages were witnessed, most notably much lower CPA and many more players. This subsequently led to a push internally within Alea. “If there’s a World Cup, for example, people stop playing casino and they gamble on sports,” he says. “Meanwhile, you’re sitting there with your roulette, blackjack and all your slots, and nothing is happening on your website. “All your friends that have a sportsbook and are partying and you have FOMO of not being invited to the party. You really need to put a sportsbook on your website. “This is something I understood a couple of years ago. We are not casino or sportsbooks. We are betting companies. We need to have all these products within our portfolio to offer to our players. You need to be this one-stop shop.” The missing link or a sign of things to come? To a certain extent, Tomic notes that this could mark the end upon being queried of if the additions of sports and jackpot represents the final piece of the puzzle or just the beginning of a much larger expansion. Meta game is the final piece of the puzzle, he says. This would see an agnostic meta game on top of sportsbook and casino, subsequently creating a funnel between both. “Players are going to go back and forth between sportsbook, casino, live game, instants, crash games etc., it’s not just the jackpot,” Tomic concludes. “In the future we’re going to do that with cashback, races, slots tournaments and syndicated betting, as previously mentioned, with teams competing against other teams people playing betting on top of this. “We are going towards the crafting of a meta game that sits on top agnostically of every vertical and allows us to basically be the source that holds them together.”