SBTech: Sports betting during lockdown

SBTech commercial VP James Coxon outlines how the supplier is supporting operators during the COVID-19 lockdown

Not much is certain during these extraordinary times, but one thing is for sure, we at SBTech are doing everything we can to protect the health and wellbeing of our employees and alongside this, continuing to maximise the revenue of our partners as part of our robust Business Continuity Plan (BCP).

We are committed to maintaining the high standards we set ourselves in supporting our partners and even with a scenario that is changing daily at different rates on a global scale, we aim to deliver the best consumer experience and B2B support levels, providing operators with new sports betting opportunities, an extensive virtual sports offering, over 180 esports events, 3,000+ games integrated within our casino hub and lottery games with up to 2,000 draws per day.

The sporting calendar has almost come to a halt in recent weeks and in the short to medium term this looks likely to continue. However, we continue to work closely with our third-party data providers to ensure we have a rich calendar of events with pre-match and live betting opportunities available to our entire network.

In this evolving situation, it is essential that we can communicate available coverage to partners with daily available events and betting markets, helping them not only to select what they can offer their consumers, but to inform their marketing and promotion activity thus keeping retention and acquisition numbers stable.

Table tennis is one example of a sport which has continued and has shown to be an interesting proposition for bettors. Over recent days, we have seen an increase in betting on the sport, and our trading team has been working tirelessly, yesterday offering 510 events that spanned 24 hours. In addition, we are constantly enhancing our pre-match offering, with unique market types such as NFL Draft markets.

At the time of writing, horse racing is still happening with around seven meetings per day taking place, and it is imperative that SBTech’s partners can access this and provide it to their customers. SBTech provides content via official sources including the Press Association, as well as ATR (for racing in Australia and New Zealand), XBNet (USA) and SIS (international).

As with the wider sporting calendar, we are closely monitoring the situation and working extremely closely with our data partners to ensure our partners are aware of the available options. 

Even with sporting events that are still taking place, there is a void left by the cancellation of so many major sports across the globe, and this provides an opportunity for innovation as we provide our operators with revenue-boosting opportunities.

SBTech has long offered a multitude of virtual sports, and in this current situation it is not a secret to state that its significance has somewhat increased. We work closely with Sportradar, Leap Gaming, Inspired and Golden Race to deliver over 3,000 virtual events per day for our partners, which includes key sports such as basketball, football, American football, boxing, horse racing and greyhound racing to name a few, with matches taking place every 150 seconds at every hour of the day.

As we have said from the beginning of this unprecedented situation, our key focus is to ensure our 1,200+ employees remain healthy and safe and that our 50+ global partners are supported and continue to receive a best-in-class sportsbook. 
If there is anything I or the wider SBTech team can do to support you in this moment, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me or any of the SBTech team.

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