Kindred Group on taking the lead

Little defines top-tier Swedish operator Kindred Group better than its keen focus on social responsibility. And in an industry that is swiftly honing in on responsible gambling regulations, Kindred has proudly soared towards the top of the pyramid in this regard. Some may say it’s the operator’s deep-rooted Scandinavian values, but its heavy leaning towards technology continues to be at the heart of fostering a desire throughout the business to protect players.

“Technology has a significant role to play here”, Kindred Futures chief Will Mace explains to EGR Technology. “We are committed to offering a safe and secure environment to our customers, one in which they can enjoy gambling as a form of entertainment and one in which we can identify – on an individual basis – potential problems if and as they develop.”

In the first quarter of the year, the Malta-headquartered firm partnered with gambling site blocker gamban and integrated an AdBlocker tool by Betfilter to let players block themselves from entering online gambling sites and viewing or receiving any ads for gambling sites. Both tools are relatively uncomplicated in technical terms, yet they will offer tangible benefits for vulnerable gamblers. At the time of launching these add-ons, Kindred’s head of player sustainability research and integrity, Maris Bonello, said she believed the “out of sight, out of mind method” to be effective in promoting responsible gambling.

Mace is quick to jump in and explain that, although technology plays a major part in implementing these measures, the human role in identifying problematic behaviours is equally as significant. “There is no replacing the human role with technology here if we are to be able to treat customers effectively and as individuals,” he says.

Kindred operates its own in-house tool, dubbed the PS-EDS (Player Safety Early Detection System), which, similarly to Mr Green’s Green Gaming system, uses a number of indicators to analyse player behaviours and implement human intervention if necessary. The next step for PS-EDS will be to develop it to work across a broader spectrum than it presently can.

Mace says technical solutions will continue to evolve at a similar trajectory as licensing requirements and regulatory guidance. Looking at Sweden as an example, operators considering applying for a licence there have been given very strict responsible gambling requirements by the government. The minister responsible for pushing the gambling act through parliament, Ardalan Shekarabi, told the press in April that licensed operators would be obliged to limit bonuses to sign-up offers and enable players to block gambling sites if they wish.

Viking soul

Commenting on the movements in Sweden, Kindred’s spiritual, and in part, physical home, CTO Marcus Smedman says the company is technically prepared to apply for a licence once the window opens in July this year. “From a tech perspective, there will not be a lot of change as entering a new European market does not particularly affect our tech operations. We can scale our tech capability across multiple jurisdictions with minimal strain to the business, allowing us to direct resources and attention to areas such as a multi-brand footprint, hyperlocal brands, customer relations and sustainability.”

Despite this readiness to enter new markets, the company is deep into the process of integrating a number of its brands onto a single platform, and technology changes are coming hard and fast. In March, 32Red staff moved into Kindred’s Gibraltar home in the much sought-after World Trade Center, joining their colleagues from Unibet and the now-defunct Stan James brand.

At the time of the move, Kindred’s general manager for the UK, Neil Banbury, told EGR: “Because we’ve got everyone under one roof now, it’s a lot easier to effectively build multi-brand teams. That can be a key enabler to share best practice and knowledge across the brands.”

Smedman reveals the integration of 32Red has proved much easier than that of Stan James considering its background as a purely online business founded in 2002. However, he says Stan James had a different and much richer legacy, which has impacted the speed and ease of consolidating the brand as part of Unibet.

“These processes are always time consuming and require a great deal of resources that would otherwise be used elsewhere,” Smedman explains. “We have just recently migrated the Stan James and iGame brands onto the Kindred platform, which has to be done one brand at a time.” iGame is a Scandinavian product that was acquired back in 2015 and now forms part of Kindred’s wider multi-brand strategy.

Kindred has a history of carrying out seemingly smooth mid-sized M&A tech integrations. Part of that can be attributed to the group’s decision to migrate all products onto its proprietary platform. This, Smedman states, ensures customers receive the same experience across all brands, particularly in security and payment processes. “No migration is [entirely] smooth, though issues like licence requirements and compliance across jurisdictions have to be taken into account.”

Technology strategies are planned three to four years in advance, with platform updates frequent and consistent. Smedman’s job is to ensure the platform and company’s overall tech strategy is in line with operational movements, which is inevitably a challenge considering Kindred’s tech teams are divided between London, Gibraltar, Paris, Madrid, Stockholm, Sydney, Malta and, as of recently, Serbia.

World Trade Center Gibraltar, the premium hub for online gambling companies

Doing it their way

Like other operators with a heavy reliance on technology, automation has become key for Kindred. Smedman insists companies not focusing on automation processes and tools are destined to fail in such a fast-paced industry as egaming. He says the firm began introducing autonomous processes around five years ago, starting with continuous delivery. The process has resulted in over 4,700 releases being made in the last year with zero downtime.

The potential for downtime is an issue that plagues any high-functioning online gambling operator, and for the majority of them, cloud-based services like Google’s Kubernetes and AWS have become must-haves for scalability and expanding product offerings. In comparison, Kindred has built its entire stack itself based on stateless micro-services, with the ambition of optimising the UX and creating a seamless process for launching new brands, entering new jurisdictions and offering new products.

“When we started to offer customers the seamless wallet experience several years ago, we knew it would add a huge amount of traffic to the customers’ single wallet,” Smedman comments. “A state- less, micro-services architecture has enabled us to scale horizontally in a cost-efficient way, and at the same time we have built our own dark fibre network in Europe, to give us ultimate control over where the internet traffic enters our own network.”

In its earlier days of operation, after launching its first product (Unibet) in 1997, Kindred experienced lags and release freezes during major events like the World Cup but, according to Smedman, the quality of services is now so high there are no setbacks and even platform migrations are relatively free of major complications. With this seemingly seamless system, the operational team are much more capable of carrying out strategic moves for the business.

Data dominates

One element built into the back-end tech is Kindred’s data platform, which Mace says collects real-time player data on everything from betting behaviour to marketing responses in order to fuel the AI technologies that help personalise customer journeys. “[Data] helps us make even better decisions across a broad front such as content creation, designing and distributing specific offers and promotions, the pricing of products and services, the purchasing of media, the targeting of ads and communications, the provision of customer service – the list is long,” Mace notes.

And like its counterpart Sky Betting & Gaming, which offers personalised promotions to its Sky Vegas users, Kindred’s real-time data collection feeds are a driving force for creating a unique customer experience. The operator also collects and stores historic data on a separate technology stack. When considering new businesses to acquire, Kindred looks to the quality of the firm’s data and technology setups as a key factor in its decision to purchase it. “[But] there is no single factor that is more important than another,” says Smedman.

Data has played a key role in establishing the operator’s latest partnership with US tech start-up Cockroach Labs on developing an SQL database. It will enable the Kindred tech team to leverage data much more easily than “[they] ever thought possible”, Smedman said, hailing the launch of the second generation of Cockroach Labs’ product. The deal started out as a pitch made by Cockroach Labs in an eff ort to join Kindred’s innovation investment arm, Kindred Futures. Mace says the alliance is driving the next generation of the operator’s proprietary platform by delivering scalability, resilience and geographical partitioning of data.

Will Mace, Kindred Futures

The start-up developed its cloud-based solution to assist tech companies in bettering their UX. But once Kindred learned more about the tech, it struck a closer partnership between Cockroach Labs and the core technology team to cater its product to meet Kindred’s need for speed. “It will deliver a really significant performance uplift by reducing latency to just a few milliseconds,” Mace says. “This means we will be able to deliver the fastest possible playing experience to our customers to wherever they are in the world. Speed is so important to customers – a slow response from any of our sites or apps is a real killer in terms of experience and so we are doing everything we can to make it as fast as technically possible.”

Kindred Futures is also looking elsewhere for smart and innovative technology solutions, and voice recognition and Amazon Alexa are currently on Mace’s mind. His team is exploring new interfaces like smart home solutions and Facebook Messenger as new channels to interact with customers and eventually allow them to place bets. Machine learning and AI are also high on the priority list of new technologies to investigate, with the product team considering adopting new measures to manage risk across Kindred’s new proprietary racing product.

The firm is looking to increase its focus on horseracing and, as a result, launched its platform in the UK and Ireland in April. Kambi’s racing product was previously used as Unibet’s sportsbook sits on the supplier’s platform. However, Kindred saw the opportunity to leverage the racing expertise of the Stan James team and develop its own offering. At the time of the launch, group head of global racing Ben Colley said he expected the platform to become a “best-of-breed example, fully supported by experienced and knowledgeable trading and risk teams in both Gibraltar and Sydney”.

The launch is the first big product movement to be made under the management of freshly appointed CPO Fredrik Kjell. Kjell, who moved back to his native Sweden earlier this year to take up the position at the company’s Stockholm office, said the decision to launch a standalone racing product stems from the desire to take full control and ownership of its products. “We have been working on personalising the offering, improving speed, simpler navigation and cross-channel features.

In addition, we have naturally expanded the off ering across all channels; for instance, with our free-to-play predictor games, just to mention one example.” The sportsbook is a key focus for the development team right now, with almost 50,000 live betting events offered in the first quarter of 2018. Kjell says they are investing heavily in the product, which is, for the most part, integrated into Kambi’s platform. Despite using a third-party system, Kjell says a great deal of work has gone into customising the UX using APIs and data feeds supplied by Kambi.

Kjell touches once again on the power of data, noting that all product verticals are integrated into the firm’s extensive big data platform so as to combine them with real-time communication technology that also drives customer services and marketing channels. “At the heart of Kindred’s strategy, we are executing a localised approach across brands and markets. Product innovation is heavily influenced by local market needs and we firmly believe that a relevant offering (products, marketing, communication) is key in building trust and loyalty with our customers,” Kjell says when discussing the very market-specific approach to development.

Kjell is part of the steadily expanding Stockholm team which will move into an office more than double the size of its current one in Q2 2019. The new business district is being developed in Stockholm’s flourishing shopping quarter. Smedman says the move is crucial to Kindred’s long-term vision as it can no longer grow at its current pace in its current tech hub. The Stockholm team accounts for approximately 50% of the group’s entire tech department.

Fredrik Kjell, Kindred CPO

Group CEO Henrik Tjärnström has previously said the move will cement Kindred’s ambition to become one of the most prominent technology companies in Sweden. Certainly, it will have big shoes to fill with the likes of Spotify and Ericsson famously finding their feet in the city that proudly describes itself as “the capital of Scandinavia”.

“Kindred as a company is enjoying healthy growth at the moment and we foresee this continuing, so the tech department has to be able to support this,” Smedman says. “The challenges we face are related to finding the talent we require, partly because there is not an unlimited supply of skilled tech talent and partly because competition is fierce from all industries.” To remedy this problem, Kindred has expanded its reach into a myriad of tech hubs around Europe and hired developers with experience in many areas outside of egaming.

The process of growth within Kindred’s Stockholm team echoes a similar story to fellow Swedish firm Mr Green, which also counts its marriage between operational and technology teams as the key driver of growth. Kindred sings from a similar songbook and, in all honesty, shares many values with Mr Green. But Kindred’s history dates much further back to the dot.com boom of the late 1990s, and in recent years it has surpassed many of its egaming counterparts in growth and group revenues.

According to technology chief Smedman, being a technology-driven business has been a key differentiator and major contributor to Kindred’s expansion over the years. And some might say the fact Kindred never entered the retail betting fray is a blessing. Though no one can say for sure, its laser focus on developing its online offering and pushing technology boundaries is certainly a key factor in Kindred’s continued development.

Joining forces

In March, Kindred staffers belonging to 32Red moved into the World Trade Center alongside employees from Unibet and the former Stan James brand. Around 110 personnel relocated from the 32Red offices in Europort, bringing the overall Kindred headcount up to 250 in the new office space, which is also home to Playtech, Addison Global and BetVictor.

Kindred’s UK general manager, Neil Banbury, said having all the brands under one roof would enable the staff to share expertise and drive the operator’s multi-brand strategy. “Kindred in Gibraltar is now a one-office business, which is great for us,” he told EGR. Banbury said the ongoing process of integrating both the 32Red and old Stan James operations had seen a number of staffers shift roles and responsibilities across brands.

He added: “Because we’ve got everyone under one roof now, it’s a lot easier for us to effectively build multi-brand teams. That can be a key enabler for us to share best practice and knowledge across the brands.” The operator also has plans to expand into new office spaces in Paris, Stockholm and Malta within the next 12 months.