Flutter officially opens new £15m tech and innovation hub in Leeds

Flutter Entertainment has officially opened its new £15m 136,000 sq ft innovation and technology hub. The Leeds office, located at 4 Wellington Place and designed by architecture firm MEPC, comprises eight floors and will bring 1,700 Flutter employees under one roof for the first time. Billed as a centre of excellence, it will serve as the main innovation hub for Flutter’s product development, software engineering, research and customer insight initiatives. In addition, the site will serve as the home for Sky Betting & Gaming’s (SBG) ‘Skills Academy’, which provides graduate programmes, early-career training and a kickstart scheme for individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds. Each floor of the Wellington Place office is designed to have a separate function; forum, meeting, presentation, focus, lounge and social. Social areas are located at the centre of each floor with all offices and meeting rooms leading out from the main social area. More than 800 employees working exclusively in tech will move into the office, including teams working on Flutter’s global sports trading platform, digital infrastructure, platform services and information security.

It will also include so called IT ‘vending machines’, offering certain IT equipment, with the aim of freeing up resources and time between IT staff. The move to the 4 Wellington Place office will significantly increase floor space and more than double its meeting rooms from 37 to 79. As part of the firm’s hybrid working model, employees will no longer have a fixed desk in the office, with six desks now being used for every 10 people working from the office. To further aid efficiency, Flutter has invested £1m into video conferencing and audio-visual equipment to connect remote and office-based employees. This includes the set-up of so-called ‘neighbourhoods’ for each operating department, which employees can also connect to while working from home. Four floors of the Wellington Place development will be devoted to the neighbourhood model, providing up to 266 physical desks and a combination of work benches, alongside sitting and standing desks. Each floor will house between eight and 18 meeting rooms, plus informal meeting spaces, quiet pods for individual working and a ‘zen zone’ recreational environment for socialising and gaming. The seventh and eighth floors of the multi-floor office have been dedicated solely to social activities. The new office also features a WeWork-style in-house café with a beer pump, an amphitheatre presentation area and in-house gym, as well as a production and editing suite and training and interview facilities. Other notable additions include electric car charging points and break-out furniture items made from recycled Coca-Cola bottles. Flutter CEO of UK and Ireland Conor Grant welcomed the official opening of the new office, suggesting the new hub would provide a boost to both the city of Leeds and the firm’s wider technology ambitions. “Our new office in Leeds is our vision for the future of working and we are excited to welcome our colleagues to this modern, agile and flexible workspace,” Grant explained. “The entire Flutter Group has benefited greatly from the leading technology capabilities we have developed in Leeds through our talented and highly skilled workforce, and this investment demonstrates our ongoing commitment to both the city and our colleagues,” he added. The opening caps almost a year of internal development following the completion of external building works at Wellington Place in December 2020. A video showcasing the building’s development process can be accessed here.