The 10 most influential online gambling people this decade: 5 & 6
Alun Bowden turns to the Nordics for the latest two entrants for his list
6. Jens Von Bahr
Evolution
Reason: Live dealer
The story of online casino in the last decade is one of two sub-verticals, slots and live casino. And for the latter it’s really a story of one firm’s seemingly unstoppable and endless rise. Evolution Gaming was founded back in 2006 and has been working with many of the major operators since then, but there was no doubt it really began to pick up steam during the 2010’s, along with the wider growth of broadband and more powerful computers.
From just under €40m in revenues in 2013 Evolution hit €245m in 2018 and is already ahead of that for the first nine months of 2019. The Evolution live casino model is the default option for what has become a huge and growing segment of online casino and ones that appeals directly to higher-value players around the world. What is perhaps most impressive is that in a market with so many direct competitors throwing resource at live casino, Evolution remains by far the stand-out choice for the industry.
Jens Von Bahr
There are a lot of people who are responsible for the growth of the company over the years, and Todd Haushalter was one whose name often crops up as a key man in the latter half of the decade’s accelerated growth. But it’s impossible to look past the founder and long-time CEO Jens Von Bahr who has been a guiding force throughout the growth of the business and the evolution (geddit?) of the live casino sector from a business that was initially believed to just appeal to Asian gamblers who didn’t trust RNG games, into the monster it is today.
Live casino is such an integral and important part of the online casino offering, and you only need to do a roughly 10x multiple of Evolution’s revenues to see how big it is, that it’s hard to imagine the vertical without it. And it’s hard to imagine it would be the case without Evolution. They also continue to grow and into new markets with North American revenues the same size as the Nordics in Q3 2019 while Asia is also growing rapidly.
Will see another supplier change the game as much in the next decade as Evolution did in the last? You can only hope so. But it will certainly take some effort indeed.
5. Anders Ström
Kindred/Kambi/Other
Reason: Smart money
This might be the most controversial name on the entire list, as it represents something the industry doesn’t often talk about. Money, and the power men behind the power men. In the UK and the US this is more the traditional PE and fund houses, but the Nordic market in particular has seen a number of individual investors and small investment groups that have been behind some of the largest and most impactful operators with the Betsson founder group and Optimizer Invest’s Henrik Ekdhal very close to making this list.
Optimizer Invest has been the funding, and more than a little guidance, behind the likes of Casumo, Hero Gaming and latterly Gaming Innovation Group and Catena Media. These are all firms that have in part helped shaped the modern egaming space and forced their peers to stop and reassess their own business models. Forward thinking, dynamic businesses that are redefining the verticals they operate within. But really when it comes to the European online gambling market it is hard to look past Kindred founder Anders Ström.
Ström founded Kindred, then Unibet, over 20 years ago and remains its chairman to this day. Kindred has been a major player in the sector for most of that time acquiring MrBookmaker in 2005 to give it the foothold in the Benelux markets it still holds today. But it has been during the last decade that it has really gone from a contender to a leader, and its multi-country, multi-brand approach that it has developed by a focus on bolt-on acquisitions has become a model even the bigger firms have looked to follow.
Anders Strom
It has also grown at a huge tick, from £150m in annual revenue in 2010 to £908m in 2018 and the firm, guided by the steady hand of Henrik Tjarnstrom has established itself in a number of major regulated markets while retaining a hand in some of the most important grey ones. It exists in a part of the sector nobody else quite matches, with Belgian, Dutch, French, British, Nordic and Eastern European revenues, and now a presence in the US.
Perhaps though a bigger impact Ström had on the sector is through Kindred’s move to launch another firm, Kambi Sports Solutions. The business was launched as a B2B unit of Kindred in 2010, but was spun off as a separate listed entity in 2014 and has been one of the key suppliers that has led the drive of gaming firms into the sports betting sector through its simple managed services model and is one of the dominant suppliers in the emerging US market.
Kindred meanwhile adopts a hands-off role with much of its key technology suppliers and you wonder if this may eventually emerge as a more widely used model in the next decade. And you also wonder if some of Strom’s other investments may also still have a bigger role to play in what comes next in egaming, even if one of the higher profile operators in Kwiff perhaps hasn’t quite delivered so far.
Ström remains a man with a big influence on the sector and it is not limited to the alliterative trio of Kindred, Kambi and Kwiff. And along with the likes of Ekdhal and other imitators they have inspired, will remain a real force for some time to come.