Graphyte co-founder on bringing Netflix-style hyper personalisation to betting and gaming

Last year ex-Ladbrokes Coral executives Damien Evans and Rob Davis set up their own firm Graphyte to solve the personalisation conundrum in the betting and gaming space.

Since launching its Recommend platform back in October 2018, the firm has built on its real-time, cloud-based personalisation platform with the introduction of Intelligent Layouts. The new product extension enables operators to deliver completely personalised web and app experiences for every individual customer.

Bringing Netflix-style hyper personalisation to the betting and gaming industry, Intelligent Layouts allows operators to automatically tailor every element of their offering to each player’s individual preferences, with bespoke navigation and menus, sport and game categories, promotions, banners and new game launches.

Intelligent Layouts sits on top of existing CMS or back-end platforms and uses machine learning to build a detailed profile on each user’s play and browsing habits.

Graphyte CEO and co-founder Evans chats to EGR Technology about the value in creating a unique customer experience and why targeting content rather than bonuses is a more sustainable approach for operators.

EGR Technology: How’s business been since we last spoke in February?

Damien Evans (DE): We’re going great guns at the moment. It’s always a challenge in the beginning with any new technology venture but in recent months we’ve had superb traction. We’re getting more and more new deals with operators and managing to expand some of the existing relationships we have in place.

Obviously, this is great – it’s validation that our tech stack works but also confirms that personalisation as a concept is as essential in gaming as it is in other industries like retail and travel.

With Intelligent Layouts, we really wanted to take personalisation to the next level – far beyond just surfacing targeted games and bets to players in a widget or via CRM channels – to enable operators to serve the absolute best of all available content on site, and make games and offers much, much easier for players to find.

Let’s think about a typical gaming site for a moment. Most will be offering at least 500 different games on site, with many of the bigger operators offering 1,000+. Then consider the available real estate on mobile (and to a slightly lesser extent desktop), a player will be able to see maybe eight to 10 games at first glance, and we know that the overwhelming majority of games are launched from the homepage or from top of category pages. So how do you effectively filter down from such a big base of products to such a small number, keep those products relevant to each user, and all in a way that doesn’t impact load times or generate flicker? For big operators that have 100,000+ customers a week, it’s a very tricky problem to solve.

The most obvious analogy, although perhaps a bit of a cliché now, is Netflix. They’ve found a way consistently keep an enormous catalogue of movies and TV shows fresh and interesting for a user base of over 150 million. While product recommendations are at the heart of the Netflix experience, what’s really impressive is how those recommendations are grouped and described so dynamically, meaning each one of those 150 million users has a completely unique experience, where everything a user sees is highly tuned and relevant.

And this is exactly what we’ve done with Intelligent Layouts, the ability to personalise every available piece of content dynamically and automatically.

EGR Technology: What’s the industry reaction been so far and the uptake?

DE: We did a soft launch in July with Gala Bingo, which is a fantastic and visionary operator when it comes to personalisation, to iron out any wrinkles and gauge the impact and uplift potential.

We were very happy with performance. The uplift has beaten even our expectations across every metric and continues to improve all the time.

Elsewhere the interest has been fantastic and I think that’s for a few reasons. Proven results obviously help but the principle of personalising at scale in this way is a hot topic in the industry at the moment and deploying a product that covers so much ground so quickly is resonating strongly, so much so that we’ll be live on four sites by the end of this year.

EGR Technology: Does the personalisation element link to the customer profile?

DE: Absolutely, it’s 100% driven by the customer, that’s what personalisation is all about. Graphyte ingests customer bet, gaming and browsing behaviour in real time, constantly incrementing a very deep profile for every user to run into our machine-learning framework.

One of the benefits of the real time approach is that we’re able to identify intent and affinity (to cross-sell or play a new game, for example) instantaneously, all of which can be served up to the customer in-session, leading to highly-targeted user experiences.

EGR Technology: How did the idea for Intelligent Layouts come about?

DE: Well, we’d always planned to build the tech to personalise at this scale, and as it happened one of our customers had had an idea to do something similar, and since we were already tentatively building the product, the timing seemed perfect and we went into soft launch in July.

Thanks to the scale of the product, we had to create a very innovative engineering approach to deliver a solution that is fast, robust and flexible at the same time. The speed and stability are particularly important given that in some cases we’re rendering an entire page.

EGR Technology: Can you tell me a bit more about how the machine learning element works?

DE: Our ML framework feeds directly from the real time data we ingest. We are constantly running a suite of ML models and algorithms to drive a multitude of different outputs, some of which are very specific and focused like cross-sell and journey interventions, and others slightly more generalised for product recommendations and navigation.

On top of the modelling, we also have our own augmented data for casino products, which allows us to be much more sophisticated and accurate in our modelling approach. This is an important part of our value proposition, since we find in almost every case that the product data casino operators have available is extremely limited so it’s great to be able to overcome that hurdle for our customers.

EGR Technology: How the trials been going so far?

DE: Really well, very positive ROI. We’ve seen some very significant uplift with the test groups that we’ve trialled. It is genuinely extraordinary.

EGR Technology: You mentioned why you think it’s important to look at targeting content rather than bonuses and why that’s a more sustainable approach. Can you tell me more about that?

DE: The narrative around sustainability of bonusing as the primary mechanism for driving retention has been gathering momentum for a while now and recent events in markets like Sweden, where bonusing regulations have become much more stringent and restrictive, are driving the debate forward with more urgency.

Intelligent Layouts can change this, managing incentivisation by delivering a better product and removing a dependency on bonusing because the content is so relevant and fresh.

Intelligent Layouts makes it really straightforward for operators to put the best version of what they have in front of their customers.

Where the product really comes into its own is in creating a capability to have that unique experience for every customer and extend this personalisation into promotions and offers that are not necessarily bonus-driven.

Almost every operator will be running content or feature-based offers and promotions, but a lot of customers don’t see them. They either don’t go to the page on the site often or they don’t read their emails. That’s a huge problem and a big value drain.

Below the line channels like email struggle to get the cut-through thanks to low open rates, whereas using on-site channels guarantees a captive audience. For example, if you’ve got a placeholder for promotional material, offers or special games, Intelligent Layouts will put it front and centre on site and make sure the offer shown is highly relevant, with an additional bonus of removing some or even all the need for curated promotional content on site.

So as long as Intelligent Layouts knows an offer is on the site somewhere as an asset, it can surface it to the player if interest is likely to be high.

EGR Technology: How does your new product tie in with your original personalisation platform?

DE: It is an add-on module so the integration is exactly the same as with our core Recommend module. Operation and configuration are straightforward and the CMS components are effectively managed on the front-end, making it a zero-effort integration for operators to enable.

EGR Technology: So, what’s next for your personalised platform?

DE: We’re expanding the capability of our messaging product, Engage. It’s an intelligent rules platform that’s currently deployed in a couple of sports operators and we use it a little in gaming as well.

Engage delivers automated bet and gameplay stimulation messages to customers, from complex real-time in-play bet awareness after certain market types have settled, to more straightforward event and bet alerts where we know a customer is likely to be interested but hasn’t bet yet, all delivered via CRM channels with fully dynamic content.

We’re working on improving the front-end of that to make it a bit more user friendly. We’re also increasing the sophistication around the types of rules that can be generated automatically. As with Intelligent Layouts, the work we’re doing on Engage is to bring forward the same holistic degree of personalisation to below the line marketing channels, with the same degree of automation and efficiency.

Tying that into the messaging capability is a really nice, holistic proposition so you end up with properly, fully unique comms and conversations with customers wherever they go.