Q&A: Liron Snir, chief product officer, GVC Holdings

Lewis Phillips speaks to Liron Snir to find out how GVC is overhauling bwin.party’s mobile product to close the gap on its competitors

GVC Holdings wasted little time in getting to work on its recently-acquired mobile poker product suite.

Following the firm’s takeover of bwin.party in February, partypoker was the first of the bwin.party brands to be given a revamp, which included a new app featuring a multi-table functionality that enables users to play up to four games at any one time.

And GVC’s move to improve its mobile business looks to have already paid off, with the channel a key driver in the firm reporting an 8% rise in pro forma net gaming revenue for the first half of 2016.

Sports wagers via mobile rose 55% in H1 and casino and games grew 98% during the six month period.

Speaking to EGR Mobile Intelligence, GVC’s chief product officer Liron Snir, who joined from Playtech back in April, provides an insight into how the firm is overhauling its mobile product set and the challenges it faces as it looks to close in on its rivals.

EGR Mobile Intelligence (EGR MI): Bwin.party previously admitted to being behind the mobile curve. How did you view the standard of products when you joined the firm?

Liron Snir (LS):  It is fair to say that at the beginning of the year, our mobile offer wasn’t where we wanted it to be. Having been based in the UK for a period, I have great respect for what some of the best operators have done here in setting the benchmark for mobile gaming products. They have set the standard to which we aspire and measure ourselves by. Is there a gap to them? Right now yes – but we are closing it fast.

EGR MI: What did you identify as being the areas you had to address immediately? Were there any quick wins or fixes?  

LS: The main areas were around things such as missing key content providers, the usability was not great and loading times were far too slow – some of the applications took around 40 seconds to load. Now it takes two to three seconds. These issues were not getting sufficient focus and management time previously. That is something we have been able to address straight away, which has allowed us to make real progress quickly.

EGR MI: Tell us more about the new partypoker app – what are the major changes? How will this improve the UX?

LS: We’re looking at this mainly as gap closure to the desktop version. Not just for partypoker but across all gaming verticals, there has been a huge transition that has moved from desktop to mobile and yet still the majority of player activity in poker is on desktop. But in sports, most of our acquisitions and activity is being conducted through mobile these days, and when you look into other brands such as bwin, you cannot be in a position where your mobile offering is not as good as your desktop offering because you will lose customers and revenue. The multi-table function is one of the new features that we have brought to mobile poker. Whenever we introduce new features, we want to make sure they are well optimised for mobile devices.

EGR MI: How do you view the standard of mobile poker products in the industry? Is there an opportunity for GVC to lead in this area?

LS: While I think it is unlikely that PokerStars will lose their leading position any time soon, I wouldn’t be surprised if we became number one after PokerStars at some point. We are investing not only in the product side of poker but also in the marketing. Tom Waters [group head of partypoker] and his team are working really hard on co-ordinating our online approach with land-based activities and bringing some out-of-the-box thinking to the table. We are involving a lot of our customers with the product development, asking what they think of the new features. During a recent land-based tournament, we introduced the mobile multi-player function to see what our poker players thought of it and see how we could incorporate their feedback. This will be an important part of product development going forward.

EGR MI: Will all GVC and bwin brands be receiving a mobile overhaul? What comes next?  

LS: Yes they will. One of the key challenges is to create the production capability and capacity to be able to roll out new product innovations across all of our brands in a short space of time. It’s an area where we’ve already made some significant progress, so bwin for example will get the poker multi-table functionality by the end of September. We are working towards a position where when a new version is available, whichever vertical it may be for, then all of the brands will receive it in quick succession.

EGR MI: Bingo is viewed as the hardest vertical to make tick on mobile – how do you plan to overcome this? How much of Foxy’s revenues come from mobile?

LS: Our mobile percentage for bingo is relatively good. Having said that, I would say we have more work to do on the product side. We need to work closely with 888 to make sure the mobile offering will be stronger. Most of the work that needs to be done is mainly around the risk mitigation around Flash technologies. I think most of the providers such as Playtech, NetEnt, and 888 need to focus on these areas, not just for bingo, but more broadly, how you transform all of your Flash content, whether it is a product line or an individual game, into HTML5.

EGR MI: Sportsbook is obviously huge for GVC and bwin, where do you see the need for mobile improvements?

LS: I think there is more for us to do around cross-selling, introducing things such as virtual sports and greater visualisation.

EGR MI: How much of an advantage is it to have your own proprietary mobile platform?

LS: I think it’s a huge advantage for us. We have a pure native product and for sports, casino and poker, which gives us complete control of our own UI and release process. This allows us to work with third-party developers to enhance our offer without being overly reliant on them.

EGR MI: What new technologies is the business experimenting with? Can we expect any releases to incorporate any of these technologies?

LS: In the past a number of operators have looked at wearable technology, and have developed some interesting approaches. Frankly however, though they may have been nice gimmicks, they have yet to deliver large scale customer engagement, let alone revenue. From my experience you need to focus on your core offer, we have enough on our plate as it is. It’s not that I’m against the new technologies but there are other areas that I would look to focus on first. For instance, I would prefer to look at new native functionality that is emerging and look at how we can use it to improve from our current offering. This is more interesting to me, rather than looking specifically at AR or VR right now.

EGR MI: What emerging trends are you seeing in the mobile gaming sector?

LS: I think this is mainly around the transition of content into HTML5. It will have a huge impact on the tech side and a lot more companies are looking to UX improvements nowadays, so I think these are the areas that are having the most impact on the mobile sector.

EGR MI: Recreating the desktop experience on handheld devices is an ongoing issue – do you think operators are content poor on mobile – that some games just can’t be recreated for smaller screens?

LS: If you go back two or three years ago, you could see that the output on mobile was much lower than desktop. But I’ve seen over the last few years that these gaps have been closed by more operators and providers after they realised what needed to be done in order to adapt the content onto the smaller screen. It is still challenging, but now most providers at least recognise what needs to be done.

I think most of the content that you have on desktop now has an equivalent or has been adapted for mobile, but that is not to say that all the products have been adapted properly yet. In live streaming products there is more to do, particularly around the stream itself within the portrait and landscape mode. Improved technologies will help with this. To take just one example, the introduction of iOS 10 will solve many of the streaming issues experienced on i-devices.

EGR MI: Is GVC looking at mobile-friendly Instant Win games, which have proved successful on lotteries and could do well, particularly with bingo customers?  

LS: Over the years I have looked at quite a few of the concepts and there are very few companies that have managed to do something nice with it. I know that Sky together with CORE Gaming have worked on some nice concepts that are a good fit for their customers. It’s about delivering the right product to the right market, and it may be an area that we will look at but I think it will only be a small portion of revenues.

EGR MI: In this issue we are talking about tech talent, does GVC have any issues finding the right people?

LS: I don’t think we have any major issues on the tech level because mobile technology has become, relatively speaking, a commodity and we have very strong people. The main challenges was around finding the right people to manage the product development and UX implementation.

Over the past few months, our focus has been on building a strong product team, which we have succeeded in doing through a series of key hires. We’ve been able to attract some of the very best emerging industry talent, people like Adele Lawton, our new head of Bingo; Rob Fell, who now heads our casino product; Andrew Whitworth who leads on content; Amy Casson-Hughes, head of front end and Oliver Bartlett who is focused on the live experience. Collectively they have brought great expertise and experience, significantly improving our delivery capabilities.

EGR MI: Should we expect any new innovative mobile products from GVC in the next 12 months or is it more a case of getting the basics right?

LS: I think you can expect to see more from us, but I don’t want to give away too much at the moment.  For the time being we are keeping things under wraps but watch this space.