Sky Bet targets safer gambling technology with new head of product
Former head of payments Andy Sacre is promoted to lead a team of over 60 developers
Sky Betting and Gaming’s (SBG) head of payments Andy Sacre has been promoted to head of core products to focus on six core functions within the businesses, including payments, identity, verification and safer gambling.
Sacre told EGR his aim was to replicate the firm’s success in payments into these other areas.
“In the last couple of years we’ve really gone from nowhere to somewhere significant with our payments approach and offering,” Sacre said.
Sacre told EGR the operator had added a dedicated a team of developers to building safer gambling tools and was currently working on a number of projects including more flexible limits for customers to use and visibility of profit and loss.
“One thing I’m really keen on and I want to bring to the role is using our trusted third parties to do more for us,” Sacre said.
“We do things like making sure a player is 18 through traditional identity partners at the moment, but actually could the likes of our banking and payments partners be helping in that space too?”
He said the team was also exploring ways to build safer gambling tools with the use of open banking APIs. Sacre’s core tribe in Sheffield is eighty strong, with over 60 developers in total.
In March, SBG was fined £1m by the UK Gambling Commission for a number of self-exclusion failings dating back to 2016.
At the time SBG CEO, Richard Flint said: “We have always taken responsible gambling and player protection very seriously but this incident showed that we needed to do more.”
Since then the operator has launched a £1m campaign to educate all 72 football league clubs about gambling related harm, and is also involved in a project with William Hill to develop algorithms to better spot problem behaviour.