It has been a whirlwind 10 months for BetWright. From gaining a UK licence last December, to onboarding 30,000 customers before reaching its one-year anniversary, the challenger booker is making noise.
Currently only available in England, BetWright recently secured sponsorships with Championship outfit Norwich City as their back-of-shirt sponsor and Leyton Orient, with thee London club’s stadium renamed the BetWright Stadium.
Partnering with clubs lower down the football pyramid is part of the strategy to support communities close to where CEO Dave Matthews and the other founders are based.
While there has been plenty of positives to date, recent speculation around the possibility of UK taxes being raised is a “challenge” for the firm, as he points out to EGR.
EGR: You received the Gambling Commission licence last November. What was the genesis of the idea behind BetWright?
Dave Matthews (DM): We had been running as a white-label operator since 2017. We had a number of casino-focused white labels and then later moved into sports – but we just wanted a bit more control over the player experience.
If you’re working as a white-label operator, you’re pretty much limited to how the operator wants to run that business and the only way for us to innovate in this space or provide a better experience for players was to take full ownership of things end-to-end. We decided to apply for a licence in 2024. It was issued in December and we launched pretty much as soon as we possibly could, so early December 2024 was when we went live. It’s been a bit of a kind of whirlwind journey ever since.
EGR: Can you talk us through the BetWright strategy for the UK?
DM: Without giving away all of our secrets, we just wanted to put a full focus on the player. So initially we’re focused on the UK market. First and foremost, we identified within the market what was the most important things to players. Or at least the things that we felt were most important. The two things that kept coming up were fast withdrawals and getting hold of money and rewards.
So, we focused initially on building out a fully AML compliant withdrawal system that integrates with our platform. Our provider ensures we remain fully compliant. The large majority of withdrawals, 95% or 96%, are able to go through within a few seconds, putting the player at the centre. From their perspective, it doesn’t matter what the amount is as long as they’ve complied with the checks, which are mostly automated, they’re able to get money in and get money out whenever they want it. That was the first thing – making sure that we’re not the blocker and providing that as a service.
The other part was development of our rewards platform, which we call Bangers N’Cash. That’s got a few unique features in it such as caching, a live tracking system. But the whole thing is centred around just making a transparent, responsible way of gambling. And we coined the term ‘bet the right way’, which is centred around safer gambling processes. It’s a strong UK focus and a UK strategy. A lot of focus on compliance as well as making the overall play experience as best as it can possibly be within the framework.
EGR: You mentioned Bangers N’Cash. What was the idea behind the loyalty programme and its name?
DM: The name’s a fun one. At BetWright, we have the tagline ‘bet the right way’. We love a pun. The founding team is a bunch of dads mostly, so we love dad jokes. We’re all British, all based here. A banger is a double entendre between something that is both great but also a sausage, which only really applies to the UK market. We thought it was just a bit of fun. It’s difficult to have fun in in this regulated environment.
But we feel like we’re walking the line, making sure we’re keeping it responsible but at the same time can have a bit of a joke around the theme. So that’s where Bangers N’Cash came from. But the actual functionality and everything else is quite serious. It’s all about transparency – showing to the customer what they get in advance, making sure they can opt in, track those rewards and cash them in early if they want to. As well as so they don’t always have to complete all of the wagering requirements in order to gain some of the value from their reward. Mostly just we’re all terrible jokers and we love puns.
EGR: Being a new operator in the UK market, what are some of the obstacles you have faced so far?
DM: Within the UK, as a new operator, it is a challenging market to enter. The barriers are quite high in terms of the expertise you need, the platforms you need, the various different software packages you’re going to have to take from different providers to get all those things integrated. The [Gambling Commission] has vastly changed over the last 10 years; it has added a lot of additional overhead in.
One of the toughest challenges is: how do you keep an experience with players that is still high and fun but also compliant within the regulatory framework? Building that up from scratch is obviously very difficult. There’s lots of big brands already in this space. Differentiation is difficult as well. But I think we’ve come some way to do that with the branding but also with the unique tools we’re putting in.
Our ability to be nimble, make quick decisions and adjust to the changing requirements as well as building features as we go helps us remain more agile and resilient against that.
EGR: Do potential duty increases signal significant danger?
DM: Yes. This affects the industry across the board. But I do think it’s particularly important for smaller operators as well. You don’t necessarily have the financial resilience that the other larger operators do intrinsically. Because we focused initially on the UK market, it would impact us more. It may impact some of the larger brands or the larger organisations running those brands in a lesser way, just because they’re more diversified. So I think, ultimately, the only way around that from our perspective is to diversify.
It is certainly a challenge. It’s certainly a risk. Obviously, we’ve had the comments from Rachel Reeves in the last [few weeks]. I think everybody’s looking at those and everybody’s concerned. We deal with a lot of other smaller operators as well, independently licensed. We work very closely with them and there’s concerns pretty much all around.
EGR: Is your technology in-house or outsourced?
DM: A bit of both. I don’t think there’s any way, given the complexity of operating in this business, that you can have everything in-house. Even the biggest operators will take games externally, for example. Our approach was to take the key platform and everything from a third-party provider but look for areas that have perhaps been neglected or not seen as core part of those products, and then find a way to fill those gaps and innovate in in those areas.
EGR: How many staff do you employ?
DM: At the point where we launched in December, there were four of us. Nine months later, there are 14 of us, and we’re probably going to add another six to 10 in the next six months. The growth has been quite the challenge as well. Just simply trying to recruit that many people and go from three to four times the number of staff right from the beginning to where we are has been a journey.
EGR: You’ve followed up your sponsorship of Leyton Orient’s stadium with a deal to sponsor Norwich City. How important are these deals for your wider marketing strategy?
DM: Primarily my background, and the guys that originally founded the business, is actually more in the digital marketing space. These deals are somewhat new to us and are as much about supporting our local communities as they are about spreading the BetWright name. It’s a dual purpose for us.
Yes, it’s the branding side, but it’s also about supporting sport within our communities, and both Norwich City and Leyton Orient have large followings close to where the BetWright founders live and where we’re located in the UK. The clubs’ fan base is predominantly a UK audience. You’ll find that within the Championship, League One, etc, that is often the case. If you go up the tiers to the Premier League and those sorts of levels, you’re having to spend quite a significant amount more.
Yes, you do get a lot more exposure, but it’s more relevant to more international markets or collective markets. For us strategically, it’s made sense to be there. They are important. It’s hard to measure effectiveness. It’s hard to know exactly how much impact they actually have when you compare it to the digital marketing. But the ability for us to, as a business, contribute to the community is really important to us. It has a double benefit.
EGR: Are there plans in place to venture out of football and horseracing and secure sponsorship deals in other sports?
DM: There certainly are. We want to add more products. Esports is an area we want to focus on, in terms of adding on the product side. But sponsorships can be tricky as it’s a bit of a difficult one to navigate. We are looking at other sports but, to be honest, this year we’ve done so much in such a short space of time that we’re going to see out the rest of this year, look at what the chancellor does in terms of taxation and everything else, because that could impact things in quite a significant way.
In terms of what future sponsorships we can do, well they have to be sustainable within our revenue. It’s not a case of what is going to raise money and overinvest in areas and just hope that it comes back. Our goal is to generate revenue, remain sustainable and then use the excess to do additional sponsorships. It’s a bit fluid. We will take opportunities as and when they come up. We’re excited. It’s just obviously there’s a lot of uncertainty ahead in the next six to 12 months.
EGR: Are there plans in place for international expansion?
DM: We’re actively working towards an Irish licence, a bookmakers licence, and they’re [Ireland] going through a regulatory process as well. We’re positioning ourselves for that. It makes sense for us, given our branding and the positioning of the brand, that it could work in Ireland as well. That would be the first step for us. As we move into next year, we’ll obviously be exploring different regulated markets and the new tax rules might push you in that that direction anyway. We’ll be looking at opportunities. There’s nothing concrete other than Ireland at the moment.
EGR: How would you sum up your UK journey so far?
DM: We’re really excited. We’re a new brand. We don’t really see ourselves as a challenger brand, but people have been saying we are because of the stuff we’re doing and the innovations we’re bringing [to the industry]. From the outside looking in, it looks that way. We just celebrated going past the 30,000-customer mark and we’ve done that all within nine months. It’s a very exciting time and it’s good for us. I think that’s balanced and offset by the uncertainty in the tax environment. But otherwise it’s been it’s been a really great process and we’re just looking forward to the next 12 months.
The post BetWright CEO: UK tax increases would impact the entire industry first appeared on EGR Intel.
Dave Matthews tells EGR why the challenger operator opted to launch in the ultra-competitive UK market and gives his thoughts on the chancellor’s potential tax plans
The post BetWright CEO: UK tax increases would impact the entire industry first appeared on EGR Intel.