Sixteen years after joining NeoGames, Aristocrat Interactive CEO and Gaming Intelligence Hot 50 of 2025 honouree Moti Malul discusses his journey to the helm of the biggest online gaming and lottery supplier
It was November 2008 when Malul joined NeoGames, a company established two years previously by his close friend Barak Matalon with the aim of disrupting the lottery industry, which was then dominated by the likes of Scientific Games and IGT.
That company would go on to form the basis to what is now the biggest gaming and lottery supplier in the industry – Aristocrat Interactive.
Back in those early days, NeoGames’ primary focus was online scratchcards.
“NeoGames was founded to pioneer and be the first in the industry to recognise the appeal and importance of online scratch cards,” recalls Malul. “It was the first to have dedicated itself to that product, customers and players.”
At first this was done with a few B2C brands that sold scratch cards online.
“When I joined, we realised that our player base was actually from a lottery player base. We knew online lottery players better than most lotteries knew, because most lotteries back then were not online. We realised that there’s a big opportunity for us to knock on the door of lotteries globally and say, ‘Hey, we know how your players behave in terms of demographic, what games they like,’ and start to be a vendor and a provider in partnership with them. So we started our journey in that direction and secured our first customers in 2009/10 in Italy and Portugal.”
For the first decade at NeoGames, Malul served as executive vice president of sales and business development, during which time the company really ramped up its operations and entered the US lottery market through NeoPollard Interactive, a joint venture with Pollard Banknote.
In 2018, when CEO Ilan Rosen left, Malul was given the opportunity to take the reins, leading the company through an IPO in New York in November 2020 during peak Covid.
It was during this time that Malul realised that NeoGames needed to broaden its offering and enter the iGaming space, as customers such as Sazka in the Czech Republic and PlayAlberta in Canada were doing.
“The trend in that decade was for lotteries to start to go online, first with their initial lottery portfolio, and then gradually migrating to become full gaming houses,” says Malul. “Look at what happened to Veikkaus, Svenska Spel, Danske Spil, Sisal and Lottomatica in Italy. We realised that if we want to be the closest strategic partner to lotteries when they go online – which is what our strategy was – we won’t be able to continue to be that without having solutions that will take them also into sport betting and into gaming.”
This realization led to NeoGames acquiring Aspire Global, including its Pariplay and BtoBet businesses, to enable the supplier to become a full gaming powerhouse.
“Aspire came with knowledge and experience of gaming operations because of its legacy business of white label and being a B2C operator, and we needed knowledge of how to run online gaming operations so that we could provide those services to our customers,” Malul explains. “And today, these come in very handy, because a lot of the solutions that we provide to customers are also tied with managed services, where we do 24/7 customer service, including cash out, fraud risk analysis, CRM marketing, and of course, responsible gaming play.”
The Aspire deal was completed in mid-2022, and a year later Aristocrat Leisure announced it was acquiring the whole group, which was completed in April 2024.
“It’s been quite a journey with a lot of milestones,” says Malul. “It’s definitely been a lot of hard work. I was offered to stay in Aristocrat and lead Aristocrat Interactive, which was a pretty exciting opportunity for me. Before gaming, I spent some time in the telecom sector at large companies including Ericsson, but in gaming, I was always in start-ups. It’s quite an interesting opportunity for me, and quite a privileged one, to be a part of a management team of the largest company in our industry.
“Of course, I really want the growth story that we created in NeoGames to continue with the same momentum into Aristocrat. But there is no time to reflect. Our industry doesn’t allow you to take a breath. So many things are changing, if you blink, you miss something.”
Malul likes to remind himself and his team that they are fortunate to be working at a company that can make an impact on the industry.
“It’s not that common,” he explains. “We decided to disrupt the lottery domain, coming in as a small provider from Europe to shake up a very traditional industry that had a very closed garden of vendors serving lotteries globally. We were not only able to penetrate it, but become a leader and that is something that we’re very proud of.
“It’s very rare in your career that you’re given an opportunity to work at a company that makes an impact on an entire industry. And now it continues, because the creation of Aristocrat Interactive is definitely going to make an impact. This is the vehicle of the world’s most successful gaming company into the online, real-money gaming (RMG) domain. This is what you want to do at work. You want to have fun and make an impact.”
Building up tools
Aristocrat Leisure’s ‘build and buy’ strategy to enter the online RMG sector began with the formation of Anaxi in October 2022, and enhanced by the acquisition of B2B content supplier Roxor Gaming in February 2023.
“They methodically worked into it and started building things organically,” Malul points out.
The acquisition of Roxor sped up the company’s organic game creation in order to get games into the market. They then looked into the alternatives and decided on buying NeoGames to turbo charge their RMG capabilities.
“When you look at where we are today, and then combine that with the content of Aristocrat, this is when and where magic happens,” Malul continues. “The set of tools that we have today is second to none. We work with lotteries and gaming operators in four continents, all the way from Africa through Europe, of course North America, but also in Latin America, with customers in Mexico and Brazil.
“It’s also the set of products that we have. We have platforms like player account management (PAM), marketing solutions and systems, and obviously a huge content portfolio. We have an aggregation platform, we have an internal sportsbook product, lottery product lines. It’s a very broad product set geographically, and it’s a very broad type of customers that we can work with. That is what I believe makes us unique and gives us the diverse opportunity for growth.”
After completing the acquisition of Aspire, NeoGames began to look into how to integrate what was essentially three different companies, by creating a structure with group functions within NeoGames, such as group legal, group marketing and group HR.
“We hadn’t even finished a third of the way of doing that when we then had to integrate into Aristocrat,” Malul jokes. “So that’s the interesting part of Aristocrat Interactive – both the challenge and the fun – because Aristocrat Interactive, when you look at it, is effectively an integration between six companies. It’s NeoGames, Aspire, Pariplay, BtoBet, Roxor, and it’s Aristocrat. It’s six companies merging almost at once, creating a new organization.”
With six companies come six different cultures on how to do business, as well as six geographical cultures with each of the headquarters in a different country – BtoBet in North Macedonia, Pariplay in Sofia (Bulgaria), Aspire in Malta, NeoGames in Ukraine and Tel Aviv (Israel), Roxor in London, and Aristocrat in Las Vegas and Australia.
“You can imagine the rainbow of colours that we have in terms of business and geographic cultures, which is a huge challenge for any type of integration and why we’re so massively proud of how great it’s actually going,” continues Malul. “It’s not easy. NeoGames group was close to 1,300 people, then you add the people that were in Anaxi and the land-based gaming systems business in Aristocrat, so all of a sudden the Aristocrat Interactive business is larger than 2,400 people, spanning all the way from India development centers into Vegas, and all the way across Europe.
“It’s a massive, massive change. I tell our employees all the time ‘change for us is the constant state’ and they need to know that and embrace the fact that we will forever morph because we adapt to the market conditions, we adapt to competition.”
Behind the go-to-market structure
Under Aristocrat Interactive, there are five key go-to-market businesses that leverage complimentary capabilities that serve the entire spectrum of the online RMG industry – iLottery, Gaming Systems, iGaming & Sports, Content & Aggregation, and iGaming White-Label.
These were established as a means to differentiate between the type of customers which they are selling to, and the competitive landscape which that segment is in.
“It’s obvious to explain why lottery is different,” Malul says. “The procurement process is different, working with governments is different, the product portfolio is different. But also, when you look at Content & Aggregation, they’re selling to the head of online casino operators, while other business units’ focal point might be the head of IT, or CEOs of brands or white labels. We decided that this go-to-market structure would be very effective, because we have a distinct profile of customers for each business unit.”
Across these segments, the company’s products and technology are shared – its PAM platform is serving lotteries, gaming operators and white label businesses, as is its content aggregation platform.
“It doesn’t matter if we had these five go-to-market segments, or if we had structured ourselves in a different way,” says Malul. “What makes my life easier is having great leadership. It’s one of the key things that that you need to invest in, in order to grow as a business. The know-how to spot the few junctions in your business which make an impact on the entire business, and bring strong, experienced people into those areas. It sounds easy, but it’s not always easy.
“You need to try to get the trust of people and work on getting the right people in the right places. And then another key is to invest in building the structure of your organization to scale, because if you don’t build yourself to scale, you will collapse. When I say build yourself to scale, it’s internal structuring but also creating internal programs and frameworks to nurture entry level and mid-level management, because the organization cannot be managed by a thin layer of top leadership.
“It needs to be managed by a very strong backbone of people… some of them were techies and now they need to be team leaders. Someone needs to understand that and help them be successful. We realised that a lot of people have fantastic professional skills, but they were not born with managerial skills. Around a decade ago we developed dedicated programs within NeoGames for different layers of managers to make sure that they understand what is required of them, and how they can grow personally.
“One of the things that we are very proud as a result of that is that the vast majority of managers in our group grew internally. We did get external experience and talent, of course, but the vast majority of them grew within the business and were promoted. And that shows a big strength to the business.”
Future direction
Malul believes that the acquisition by Aristocrat won’t change the future direction of the company, but will channel its efforts into those markets that it can get a larger market share.
“North America is obvious,” he says. “We have a big push into North America, especially around Tribal customers, as many of those have not yet made decisions into future iGaming or sport betting. But there are also other markets that we’re looking jointly on how to leverage, taking the Aristocrat content and basically moving it through the pipelines that Pariplay has planted around the world via its aggregation platform, which is connected to more than 170 operators.”
Malul dismisses the argument that there is a risk of slowing down when being acquired by a larger company, and says that it is essential to harness the tools and opportunities that have been created as part of a larger group.
“The key is not to be frustrated from wanting to be small and agile as you used to be. In fact, you need to identify the advantages of being a part of a large global company. if we were a startup, then we would need to continue to open up doors by ourselves with our own sales team. But now we have these huge relationships that have been established for years and they are at our disposal to use.
“The same goes for compliance certification and regulation. All of a sudden we have teams at Aristocrat that know how to deal with regulators in terms of product certification, system certification, compliance regulation. If we learn how to harness this, we will actually move faster in areas. Do you know what advantage it gives us when we’re working with a company that is licensed globally in more than 300 jurisdictions? Don’t look at what you lost, look at what you gained, and that’s where truly magic happens, and we’re constantly looking at what we gained.”
Since those early days at NeoGames, it’s clear that both the company and Malul have come a long way. Did he ever think that the company would get to where it is today?
“I have to admit, we didn’t think that far,” admits Malul. “But what we did think and what we believed was possible was to be able to disrupt a very large market and become a significant player in it. Even if our competitors were multi-billion dollar companies with thousands of employees, we believed that we could do it and that we needed to build ourselves with the right team and the right innovation to get it done.
“When we went public, for us it was a way of acknowledging our success. We didn’t know, of course, that Aristocrat would show interest. We just continued to wake up in the morning and grow the business to the best of our ability, and that’s been the DNA of the company from day one.”
This interview was first published in the January 2025 issue of GIQ magazine, when Malul was named as a Gaming Intelligence Hot of 2025 honouree