Reaching its full potential: Gaming Innovation Group CTO

Since its inception in 2008, Gaming Innovation Group (GiG) has taken on a somewhat of a jack-of-all trades role, as it juggles the constant upgrading of its B2B offering with rolling out new customer facing products.

The operator has also been strengthening its performance marketing portfolio through the acquisition of affiliates across Europe and beefing up its in-house cloud platform.

Chief technology officer of the group, Mike Broughton, says the company is now in the process of upgrading its platform to cater to additional sportsbook operators with more specific needs.

GiG’s mission is to create an open and connected ecosystem within the industry, taking many of its learnings from companies like Airbnb and Lyt.

And based on recent trends, it seems that dream could soon come to fruition.

EGR Technology: What’s your career background in the technology industry?

Mike Broughton (MB): I started life working in planetariums, which unfortunately didn’t work out as they started to close down in the UK. I began working at the Open University and then in computing, but my background is mathematics and astronomy.

I’m a full stack and Microsoft man. I’ve had experience in Assembly, Java, Scala and others for a number of years so I’m fairly well-rounded in terms of technologies.

EGR Technology: What is your back-end set up at GiG?

MB: We have big servers in Amsterdam with a huge pipeline connected to the European servers and our clientele, a couple of big DRs in Malta and data is of course replicated in Malta because it’s necessary for compliance. The team which looks after it is about 10 to 12 people.

EGR Technology: Why the decision to do everything in-house and build your own platform?

MB: When we first launched Guts we did very well but we weren’t entirely happy with the service levels of our platform provider at the time and we thought we needed to do better.

So we shopped around to find an alternative and came to the conclusion that we couldn’t so Robin [Reed, CEO] decided that we should build our own.

We’re getting very close to completing the set-up, and we are rewriting large portions of it now into V2 going forward. We’ve taken the best practices we have invented in some areas and taken the worst practices in others and in the future we need to make sure we’re absolutely top dog in everything.

I think we’re very well positioned as we’ve come to the market with an offering that is slightly different to everybody else’s. It’s much more contained, you don’t need to bolt on additions from anywhere else, as we have it all built-in.

That’s something that doesn’t really exist out there, as usually you have to bolt on payment providers and other elements.

In terms of third-party providers we use validation and KYC on the front-end as you have to have them. Also for payment providers, ECG, dev code, and of course game providers.

EGR Technology: Where else in the technology sphere do you draw inspiration from?

MB: We’re always looking at the latest and greatest. It doesn’t matter if it comes from the tech giants Facebook and Google or a new kid on the block. If they’re doing something that is on parallel or of interest to us in any way, shape or form then we want to pick it up and run with it.

We’re always on the look-out for start-ups and small businesses. If it’s new and innovative, we want to see it. I don’t think the gaming industry is necessarily one of the best places to look; you have to look everywhere for new technologies.

EGR Technology: What are some of the drawbacks of hosting your own legacy system?

MB: It’s very exciting; it’s a whirlwind story and I think most of the staff agree. Perhaps the only drawback is immense overloading of work and being responsible for 25-30 front-end labels. Now we have clients that get upset if we have any downtime so the focus shifted from being the best, to being stable as well as being the best. The emphasis is on keeping sites up and running consistently.

We manage huge amounts of traffic now thanks to our servers being much more beefy than they were two or three years ago when they experienced a couple of hiccups because we didn’t have the hardware, but now we do. We didn’t expect to grow to quite as big as we are now, at least not in this short space of time, so we’ve had to speed up our growth to ensure we can still keep up with the big boys.

EGR Technology: When migrating partnering firms onto the iGaming Cloud system, how do you ensure they don’t face much downtime and disruption to their operations?

MB: In order to move people off an old system and onto a new one with minimal downtime you have to essentially take them offline for a number of hours, move them physically to the new centre and bring them up in the cloud. There is always downtime during the final swap of the database, but we minimise it by moving everything across concurrently.

In theory we only have to take it down during the last part to ensure everything is settled. Payments etcetera are stopped from coming in and the system is moved across. The downtime depends on the size of your player base and when the system is moved across.

EGR Technology: What technology movements is GiG working on currently?

MB: That would be blockchain all the way. We’ve started to look into it, so watch this space. I think most operators will be looking in that direction eventually. In theory it will make everything so transparent, the trust factor will go through the roof.

We’re updating our BI at the moment and just released out first B2B BI offering. Most recently, we’re using rapid communication, the Kafka open-source platform and containers. Anything that is new and shiny we will test it to see if it is useful, and if it is we will implement it. We believe that our BI offering is very stable and able to be pushed very heavily.

Artificial intelligence is hidden away in the depths somewhere. One of the biggest problems is people need to understand what AI is and what it actually does. I believe the key area for AI is responsible gaming. You can use key algorithms to learn particular behaviours and use it to flag up players. It is very early days but we’re working out what to do with it.

iGC player analytics as seen in the new BI offering

EGR Technology: What are the technical complexities of operating a selection of different brands under one umbrella?

MB: They are all individual and have their own development teams. All the brands are very different to each other with their own team, game flow and UX. They don’t interfere with each other. There is cross pollination in terms of one side helping the others with a game layer perhaps, but essentially they are entirely separate.

EGR Technology: What would you say are the main differences between the GiG offering and other providers that supply a full suite of product verticals?

MB: To begin with people thought it would be very hard for us to have a B2B side because we have a very successful front-end with our own customer-facing brands. People thought it would very difficult for us to sell our information on.

What has actually happened is that we have developed what we want on our platform, and we know what others want because we are also a casino operator.

We have seven brands that tell us what makes a great platform and it’s helped us a great amount. When we first started off we designed a system that would benefit our brand Guts because we only operated that brand. We extended it from there realising casinos needed slightly different offerings to your standard CMS. We designed a system based around our own successful casino operations.

We offer one solution but partners don’t have to use all the features; companies may use them differently. If you look at the Rizk wheel for example, Guts uses a completely different game layer methodology.

You can use APIs in a different way, or your registration flow can be incredibly quick or incredibly lengthy. How operators use us is a completely UX/UI experience.

EGR Technology: One of the next movements for GiG is updating its sportsbook platform. How are developments going?

MB: The sportsbook platform is being developed by Alan Aquilina and Alan Attard. We are developing a brand new trading tool with risk management, and this means using state of the art tools for handling our own risk, rather than relying on third-parties.

This gives us full flexibility and lets us more easily control and customise our offering. We’re building it completely from scratch in the big bang so we’re not going to have any ongoing upgrades. It’ll just be one big disruption for the World Cup. It’s a clever scaling model, which will be announced soon.

EGR Technology: Why the decision to expand your B2B offering into sportsbook?

MB: We always wanted to offer a ‘one-stop shop’, rocking the core of our ecosystem. The USP for us is that we offer everything in-house, and at the moment, odds etc, we don’t do. If we go back to grassroots and build everything from scratch we can offer them.

Partners can plug into us for any odds feed but they don’t have to. They can use our generating system if they wish. The first market we’ll enter will be the standard Nordics via our in-house operator brands.

We’re on full speed for the World Cup. We offer a one stop rate over what any other single standing operator can do.

EGR Technology: What products are you working on next?

MB: A number of new things going on at the moment are that we have a great big rules engine we are developing, on soft rules for more compliance and regulated markets we’re looking to get into. GiG is also carrying out more game integrations. We are also beefi ng up our resilience for larger-scale clients so we can go

Tier One when the opportunity strikes. This is to ensure we can scale ‘on the fly’ and everything is automated. This requires us to throw a huge amount of resources at the game layer and making sure that everything scales up smoothly so you don’t have jitters while playing. In terms of tech resources we are still a relatively small company, so our tech resources are largely taken up with those projects, also considering day-to-day operations. We need a number of new people, and currently we’ve got 50-60 positions open. About three years ago the market was saturated over here and it became very hard to recruit tech staff.

EGR Technology: When developers move over to work within the gambling industry do they tend to find it is a major change to what they’re used to?

MB: It depends what layer you work on. If you’re in the back-end you will likely see a large amount of differences in terms of security and number crunching. We want to make sure everything is exceptionally performant. That’s one thing people aren’t used to. However, if you’re a front-end coder it’s probably not a great deal different, apart from the new technologies.