Matchbook lays foundations for the future

In the same way Netflix revolutionised the entertainment industry and Airbnb brought lodging into the 21st century, Matchbook is banking on its own proprietary technology in its quest to disrupt the online gambling sector.

The exchange operator recently completed its migration onto a new platform, which it says will provide immediate benefits for customers including faster bet-placement times, a more reliable and resilient website, equipped with more markets and live betting.

However, the increased product portfolio pales in comparison to the potential long-term benefits the company is set to benefit from with the new platform.

As Matchbook’s CTO Iarf laith Kelly puts it: “Our goal over the next 12 months is to have as many different versions of Matchbook as there are Matchbook customers.”

The key factor will be personalisation, and the new platform will allow the operator to present every different type of customer in its database with a unique offering.

Recreational punters, for instance, will be shown a sportsbook-style interface to help get over the initial barrier to entry associated with an exchange. By contrast, professional traders will be offered a new ‘trader betslip’ giving them a detailed overview of their positions and offers across a variety of markets.

These features, as well as other innovations, will be rolled out across the next 12 months, as Matchbook looks to eat away at Betfair’s market dominance.

Speaking to EGR Technology, Kelly gives an insight into the development of its new proprietary platform, the challenges involved in migrating, and how technology will ultimately give them the edge in the months to come.

EGR Technology: What does the new betting platform allow you to do that you couldn’t before?
Iarfhlaith Kelly (IK): The new betting platform is all about enabling the business to deliver on its strategic vision. It will allow rapid innovation in new feature development at a rate that we’ve never seen before. It’s also about scale and performance. We set ourselves some pretty aggressive targets when designing the system and we’ve been blown away by the initial performance metrics. We’re currently serving more than 300 million API requests on an average day, and we expect that to be up over a billion daily requests before the end of the year. Speed is obviously crucial to our customers and we’re seeing some very impressive initial numbers there too.

Having a platform as advanced as this also has other benefits. We’re primarily a technology company and great people want to work with the best tools in the business. Having such a new platform built on the most advanced technology available is attracting top talent from around the world, and that’s helping to drive our ambition and our ability to execute to even higher levels.

EGR Technology: What was wrong with the old platform?
IK: There really wasn’t very much ‘wrong’ with the old platform per se. It did what it needed to do and has got us to where we are today, but it was for a different era. We had reached the point where we needed to have much more control and flexibility and an ability to rapidly deliver high value product to our growing customer base.

So we decided to start afresh using the best technology and system architecture available. We’ve modelled much of the design of the new platform on the designs of financial trading systems, and with some additional performance tuning we expect to see similar response times in the future on transaction speeds, which would really be an industry first.

EGR Technology: Was it a tricky process to switch all the sports across?
IK: When people ask us this question we often use the analogy of moving between two planes in mid-flight. There’s a great scene at the end of the 1997 Harrison Ford movie Air Force One where the remaining passengers have to escape and to do so they slide along a cable connecting the two planes. It’s a very challenging manoeuvre. The passengers are harnessed in and slide through the air along the cable until they reach the second plane. It’s a great piece of Hollywood action. The challenge of moving our sports and our customers across from one platform to another in ‘mid-flight’ was a bit like that.

EGR Technology: Why did you leave football as the last sport to migrate over to the new platform?
IK: We moved sports over gradually as a way of controlling the load and the rate of growth on the new platform. It’s completely new, so we wanted to be fully confident in how it performed at scale. We needed to make sure we did it right first time. The trickiest part though was to have the discipline to stick to our convictions. We knew this was the right thing to do, and the right time in our journey as a business to do it. We moved football over last as it’s our most popular sport among customers and we wanted to be 100% confident in the new platform before moving it over.

EGR Technology: How will the new platform help to differentiate yourself from the competition?
IK: Traditionally, technology has been used to enable businesses to carry out their functions, but with this new platform, technology is actually driving innovation and creating a competitive advantage. The platform itself has become a differentiator. We firmly believe that through continued investment in our platform, product, and technology that we can disrupt the gambling industry in the same way that Netflix, Spotify, and Airbnb have disrupted each of theirs. Another way the platform empowers us is in its data modelling capabilities, driving a personalised customer experience. By building up a complete view of each customer and their usage patterns, we can use machine learning techniques to anticipate their actions and provide a unique experience for each user.

We’ve had to maintain a very high level of discipline and a commitment to our long-term goals to achieve this. Over the last two and a half years, we’ve sacrificed a lot of features in the short term to build out the right infrastructure for the long term. We’ve positioned the company very carefully to fully capitalise on this new accelerated growth phase, bringing us to a point where we are now finally ready to release new and exciting features on our next generation platform.

EGR Technology: How will the new platform enable you to provide personalisation and introduce innovative features?
IK: Our technology and product strategies underpin the objective to provide a unique and personalised experience for each of these bettors. It’s all about providing the right experience for each customer and our goal over the next 12 months is to have as many different versions of Matchbook as there are Matchbook customers.

Personalisation comes in many different ways. Interaction design, fluid customer journeys, timely market recommendations, and appropriate bonusing is all a part of it. It’s about off ering simplicity to casual bettors and from there progressively enhancing the experience for more sophisticated exchange customers, right through to professional traders. It’s also about offering the right product at the right time. Some of the innovations will be immediately visible to customers via the UI; and some of it will be done in the background via our data analytics processes and structures. This is where modelling comes in to help us understand each individual customer, both with their habits and their intentions.

Leveraging machine learning and data analytics capabilities to off er what the customer wants next before they even know it themselves. That’s what we’ll be delivering in the next phase of our product roadmap. In the coming months you’ll see these innovations begin to launch across all platforms on desktop and mobile.

EGR Technology: Was it worth developing this in-house?
IK: This has been in the works for over two years but it’s more than paying for itself. Every company is a technology company now. If you don’t own your technology, you are not in control of your own future and that’s a very risky place to be, especially in this industry. We own and control all of our technology which gives us a tremendous advantage. We control our product roadmap and only build what we need.

We focus on what’s important for the customer and a key part of the value for the customer is to give them best price. To do this we need to be lean, efficient, and have plenty of automation. With savings in efficiency across the business we can be extremely competitive, passing these savings onto our customers. So yes, definitely worth doing in-house.

EGR Technology: How does this platform compare to your rivals?
IK: The new platform is a complete end-to-end event-driven system. This scalable approach to building distributed systems has been tried in the industry before at enormous expense, but so far others have only managed to transition small parts of their system to this architecture. We believe we’re the first in the industry to offer a true end-to-end event-driven exchange platform, which gives us a huge advantage.

We benchmark our technology, not so much against industry competitors but against the most successful tech companies in the world. As a result, we’re comfortable that our technology stack is leading edge, not only in the gaming industry but in the wider technology industry as well.

The true difference here is that our industry competitors have mortgaged their futures to third parties and in some cases across multiple platforms. Their view of the customer is fragmented, split across multiple systems, which have been built by other companies. This makes truly understanding your customer much more difficult, if not impossible. Having technology companies service your business rather than having it power your business is the wrong approach, especially where our industry is today. Owning your own technology is the only way to go.

EGR Technology: Do you expect to offer more markets and live betting as a result of the new platform?
IK: Absolutely. The new platform will enable us to go wide, in terms of more events and more markets, and deep as well, with a better performing API with attractive incentives to our market making partners. In practical terms we expect to more than triple our live off ering over the next three months. We’ve also just added Challenger tennis and will be adding international horseracing and more North American sports very soon.

EGR Technology: And this in turn will help increase liquidity?
IK: Yes indeed. The underlying capabilities of the new platform will be very attractive to market makers, helping to boost liquidity across all of our markets. We’ll also be running a series of events later this year for API customers and market makers, showcasing the advantages of the new platform and how it can help them do more.