Q&A: Breaking Boundaries

Having just relocated to its new headquarters on London’s Gray’s Inn Road, sports pools provider Colossus Bets continues down a path of physical and digital expansion.

In its relatively short five year lifespan, the London-based firm’s flagship “lottery for sports fans” product has been integrated across the sites of 35 white-label partners.

But while the concept may be straightforward, the tech stack behind it is far from simple.

The company’s in-house software runs complex mathematical algorithms to formulate multi-leg pools that incorporate hundreds of players from a myriad of locations around the world.

Offering multiple languages and currencies adds an additional layer to the already tech heavy process.

According to chief technology officer, Myles Milston, the system was built on three key factors: cost-effectiveness, flexibility and efficiency, including the ability to tack it on to any future partners’ back-end.

Speaking to EGR Technology, Milston also divulges the complexities of integrating the Colossus product to an operator’s wallet API and how the firm’s Cash Out feature has matured into an industry standard.

EGR Technology: How did Colossus Bets get started?

Myles Milston (MM): Bernard Marantelli, our CEO and founder, came up with the concept of full or partial cash out by relinquishing rights or changing ownership of a bet. Up until then, the only option that existed was private hedging or exchange hedging that relied on placing large, often complex offsetting bets.

Bernard combined this new streamlined form of cash out with the idea of offering large minimum prize guarantees on sports pools, thereby creating a more engaging customer experience and more appealing product than anything else on offer globally.

Calculating a cash out offer on a multi-leg pool is a significantly more complex mathematical and computational problem than on a single bet and we had to build new technology to solve it. And since we introduced the concept, cash out has become an industry standard across sports betting.

Bernard started the company by having the technology built externally. This was sufficient to start with but very soon the externally built tech offered limited growth – it couldn’t handle new features and sports, and was also overly complicated and expensive for new partners to integrate to.

That’s the point when I joined Colossus, hired a development team, rebuilt all of the tech and relaunched with our existing four partners.

EGR Technology: Does the B2B arm make up the majority of the business?

MM: We’ve always held the view that our product is better distributed through partners that already have traction with their client base. As an example, Betfair is one of our partners. It didn’t have an existing sports pool and many aspects of our product are quite helpful to them in terms of customer retention and acquisition, such as the free play version of our pools. We build a fully customised microsite with very little work required on the partner’s side. Our fastest integration to date has been 14 days from start to live.

We use our B2C site as a launch pad for new products and innovation to iron out any bugs. As an example, earlier this year we launched our Syndicates product on our own site first, then rolled it out to partners after we had ironed out a few teething issues. What was really interesting about Syndicates is that our betting turnover doubled within a week, and since then it’s gone up five times. Syndicates gives customers a fun new way to engage with the product, while feeling like they’re part of a team or community and it is the only bet type people are eager to share socially.

EGR Technology: How big was the migration on to your in-house tech stacks?

MM: I joined in December 2015. In April 2016 we started re-building the tech and we went live at the beginning of August 2016. In those four months between April and August we rebuilt all of the existing tech, infrastructure and also re-integrated to our existing four partners. Since then it’s been a case of expanding the product range and number of partners. What we tried to do was build something that was easily replicable as a white-label product. So we designed several templates that we could replicate and customise for each of our partners. The most complicated part is integrating to a new partner’s wallet API, however all that work is on our side and we’ve streamlined that as much as possible.

Depending on the complexity of the partner’s API we generally complete the integration to it within anywhere from a week to three weeks. After that’s done, rolling out a new microsite only actually takes us half a day. We spin up a new machine, copy all the code over, and then change a few variables to customise the fonts and styles which makes it still look like a seamless part of the partner’s existing site.

EGR Technology: How complex is the Cash Out system on a pool with players based in different countries?

MM: Calculating cash out on a multi-leg pool is a much more complex proposition than a single bet. It requires very chunky infrastructure. On the really complex pools we’ve got the calculation timeframe down to 30 seconds, and then we want to send out notifications to all our customers as quickly as possible.

Half-time in a football match is only around 15 minutes, so every second counts.

In addition, all cash out offers are calculated centrally here in the UK. However, given the geographical distribution of our microsites and our partners, we have to get those cash out offers back out to far-reaching territories in as short a timeframe as possible. Therefore, we are continually looking for ways to cost effectively improve our latency.

EGR Technology: What are some of the biggest hurdles you face when integrating new partners?

MM: First of all, there is often limited tech resource available on our partner’s side. For that reason we’ve built a product whereby 90% of the integration work is on our side. In addition, many of our partners have tech that is very old.

This can sometimes mean that their wallet API is more restrictive and doesn’t have some of the functionality we require. In a few cases, partners haven’t had a wallet API that we can’t use at all – which means they either need to build us one, or we have to find an alternate solution.

In some instances we have integrated with platforms, such as BetConstruct, which make it very easy for one of their partners to then take our product. Because we’re still a relatively small company we’re quite agile and nimble in our approach. However a lot of the partners we deal with are large organisations that understandably move at a slower pace.

EGR Technology: How tech heavy is the product? How big is your tech team?

MM: Out of a total staff of 35 we’ve got 16 techies. The product is very tech heavy. Our advantage as a company is our superior mathematical knowledge in multi-leg pools and ability to hold risk. All of that only comes to life through custom built and relatively complex tech.

When building our own tech we had to build something that was easily replicable and cost-effective for partners to integrate to, as flexible as possible because every partner we integrate has a completely different tech set up, and also as efficient as possible in terms of speed and execution.

We built it so that what needs to be flexible is, while everything else is still as rigid as possible so it can be replicated as quickly as possible and is highly efficient.

EGR Technology: What third-party suppliers do you use?

MM: We’ve got data centres throughout the world. Some of those house our own servers, and some are rented servers which we use for rapid expandability if we have to scale up. We use external translators, we do some testing externally when we require additional QA resources, Cloudfl are for CDN and DNS management, Mousefl ow for tracking activity on the site and Optimizely for A/B testing.

We generally prefer to do things in-house but it also doesn’t make sense to re-invent the wheel in some cases. There’s a trade-off between how long it will take for us to develop, what the cost is and how much other development work we’ve got going on.

EGR Technology: Having been recognised for your innovation eff orts at the recent EGR Marketing and Innovation awards, how do you stay at the forefront of innovation in the industry?

MM: To be honest, we haven’t really tried to keep in front. What we’ve done is that we started out with the premise of making our product as good as it can be, based on collective years of experience in betting. In order to do that we hired some really good developers and collectively came up with ways of achieving that.

With a focus on the end goal we inadvertently came up with innovation. Aside from Cash Out, Syndicates is probably our most significant innovation to date. It’s not a new concept, but we’ve built and delivered it in a new way.

Any customer from any one of our partner sites or our own B2C site can either start or join a Syndicate with any other customer from any of our sites, and then also either remain completely anonymous or promote it on social media.

EGR Technology: What is next for Colossus Bets in terms of tech movements?

MM: We’re currently undergoing a significant rebuild of our front-end, and we’ve just rebuilt our back-end. We wanted to improve some of our infrastructure for reliability and expandability in the future, and we also wanted to improve our site’s speed. Having grown so quickly and customised a lot of features, our frontend was beginning to get too slow for our liking. The summer break in top-tier football was a good opportunity to get that done. We’re shortly relaunching our own B2C site with the new UX and then we’ll gradually roll that out to partners. After that is a focus on quite a few new things. The next 12 months are really about expansion. We’ve got some big projects in horseracing coming online, a host of new pools, sports and products in different areas of the world and various new partners coming online.

EGR Technology: Where’s the future of egaming headed?

MM: We have looked at running pools on esports leagues and championships, however betting on esports comes with its own challenges. First, a lot of the followers and competitors are under the legal gambling age. Second, it’s harder to regulate against situations where competitors are tempted to throw matches. œ