A closer look: Ladbrokes mobile

Having scrapped its last mobile product in favour of Playtech’s Mobenga platform, Ladbrokes has enjoyed something of a renaissance on the platform

After what was a tough 2013 Ladbrokes has backed itself to bounce back over the course of the next 12 months and pointed towards its mobile product for signs of life.

That might seem like a bizarre inference to make considering how the bookmaker’s rivals had raced past it, accumulating customers as they went. The likes of Paddy Power, William Hill and Betfair can all boast higher mobile revenue than Ladbrokes, and seem to have left the UK giant trailing in their wake.

And none of those firms have rested on their laurels with Paddy Power and Betfair dedicating substantial resources towards app development and William Hill setting up its new Shoreditch office. Ladbrokes too has a new mobile centre of excellence, but with mobile turnover from 2013 of £40.9m the numbers don’t as yet compare well against those rivals.

William Hill made in excess of £40m over the course of the year just from mobile gaming products, while Paddy Power mobile revenue of €212m (approximately £174m) towers over what Ladbrokes has posted. But there are more than a few signs of green shoots of revival at Rayners Lane.

Ladbrokes CEO Richard Glynn, with many expecting his job to be contingent on the operator making a success of its digital business, has pinned a lot of expectation on mobile coming good. “The digital offer, particularly mobile, of Ladbrokes is pivotal to our competitiveness going forward and the business remains absolutely focused on delivering a product that attracts customers and delivers for shareholders,” Glynn said within the firm’s 2013 annual report.

Mobenga to the rescue

And after realising that 2014 must be better, Ladbrokes wasted little time in ringing the changes. The operator began to migrate its mobile customers to a product on Playtech’s Mobenga platform in December last year, a migration that occurred without much of a hitch at all. Since then, it has not looked back.

The migration to Mobenga hailed a complete change in strategy for Ladbrokes. Having ditched the development of its previous mobile sportsbook – a product considered even by Ladbrokes to be complex, cluttered and too feature rich – Mobenga was designed specifically to slot into a product gap and bring the operator onto a platform that would enable it to compete on a more even keel.

The initial exchanges have been promising. Customer adoption of the product has been quick and the app surged past its early download targets. By late February the app had already reached 40% of the total downloads for 2013 and as much as 60% of the operator’s digital gross win was coming through mobile on some weekends pleasing Andrew Bagguley, director of mobile and devices at Ladbrokes.

Bagguley places huge emphasis on the Mobenga product in resurrecting Ladbrokes’ fortunes on mobile. “I think it’s the build,” he says. “I think it’s about having the right platform and making it as easy to get to placing a bet as possible.” Even on the operator’s HTML5 site, Ladbrokes have tried to keep things as simple as possible under the new approach.

New features like quick deposit (momentarily taking the customers out of the betting flow if they have sufficient funds to deposit, rather than making them restart the process again) and quick bet (allowing customers to place stakes on single events without having to load up the betting slip) have served as ways to streamline and simplify that process even further.

Although its performance has been undoubtedly positive for Ladbrokes, the sportsbook is not yet the finished article. “We’ve taken that product and placed it into an evolutionary roadmap, and our main objective is to do that by the World Cup,” says Bagguley, indicating that this summer’s betting bonanza in Brazil is the main goal for the operator internally.

Integral to this roadmap is the Ladbrokes Innovation Lab, a mobile development team launched in partnership with Chelsea App Factory, mobile specialists tasked with accelerating app development in November last year. Since then four new applications and around 25 new features have been added, designed to make the app easier to do business with. A good Cheltenham and an “absolutely fantastic” Grand National would certainly seem to indicate Ladbrokes is back on track.

Brilliant basics

Most of the new features are what Bagguley has coined the ‘brilliant basics’. These are simple additions that cumulatively result in substantial improvements. It’s an approach not too dissimilar from the incremental gains approach adopted by sports teams, and the result has been to make the Ladbrokes applications just as agile. “People want something that is really quick and a lot easier to use and navigate around than [our] previous version,” Bagguley says.

Bagguley does however concede that Ladbrokes has a lot of catching up to do if it really is to challenge the front runners in mobile adoption, with features as simple as additional mobile payment methods being taken into account.

Ladbrokes still only accepts card payments for deposits, while other operators have sought to add as many as possible. These are in the works, but before they can be integrated into Ladbrokes’ mobile products the operator’s migration to Playtech’s Information Management System (IMS) back-end needs to complete.

Ladbrokes insists that this will be finalised prior to the World Cup in June and a raft of improvements are ready to be rolled out when it does. Payment methods are the obvious candidate, but perhaps most notably will be single sign-on and wallet functions – undoubtedly one of the key enablers on mobile devices.

This will be followed by other innovations that Ladbrokes has already been working on. “There’s a whole load of progressive features that will take us up to the next level,” Bagguley says, refusing to be drawn on just what the bookmaker has up its sleeve.

Outsourcing development

What Bagguley is happy to embellish on however is Ladbrokes’ deal with Chelsea App Factory, the app development specialists and previous William Hill collaborators that Ladbrokes has tasked with “accelerating” app development within the company. Teams from both Ladbrokes and Chelsea App Factory were merged and strategic and analytics capabilities were assembled, allowing Ladbrokes to measure and justify the new features it was working on.

Rather than just assess which ones were worthwhile however, the team and its work allows Ladbrokes to prioritise new features which, when you’re playing catch-up, could prove to be an enviable quality. “We’re not just looking at great ideas people might come up with, we’re trying to look at things we know work and the customer data that tells us what they want,” Bagguley adds.

This insight is then given to internal product management teams that build the product features first and foremost, with Ladbrokes placing them at the heart of product development in order to increase their efficiency.

Central to its app development has been the decision to move its mobile operation away from the Rayners Lane head office to a new Central London location. “It’s an environment in which it can prosper and run with those kind of analytics, ideas and innovation,” Bagguley says, but is quick to insist the move has not hidden the development away. “We’re not hiding away in a room doing this, we’re connected into the stats and the progress of the wider business in terms of marketing and communications,” he adds.

A renewed focus

With the changes its made, Ladbrokes has been allowed to put the last year behind it and focus on one goal; the World Cup. Mobenga has predictably seen the most development with secondary apps removed from mobile store fronts as the operator looks to instead concentrate its attention on getting its core application right first and foremost.

This is for good reason. With the World Cup taking place in the relatively unfriendly Brazilian time zones, Bagguley expects bettors to flock to their mobile devices to place their bets. “I think [the World Cup] is going to be mobile centric and device centric, I think a majority share of our activity will be from mobile devices,” he says.

The new sportsbook may be the ace up Ladbrokes’ sleeve right now, but a full portfolio of mobile products – including recent casino and live dealer releases – joined up under a single sign-on and wallet provided by Playtech is the end goal. “The objective is to have a strong cross-sell for all of those products and across them so our product delivery is designed to do that,” Bagguley says.

But Ladbrokes also has one eye on the future with the changing mobile landscape throwing up a host of new challenges from wearables to smart TVs and beyond. “There’s lots of good stuff coming out and we’ll be looking at things that enable people to do more with their mobile,” Bagguley says. And that Ladbrokes is in a position where it can look to innovate is testament to how far it’s come.

For Bagguley though, such technology can wait until next year as, for now at least, Ladbrokes has far more pressing events on the agenda. “We’re just looking at the World Cup, getting the product to be as best as it can and hopefully taking some market share,” he says. “That’s our objective.” If they get that right then the sky is the limit.