Established a decade ago by Swedish duo Karl Engström and Anders Ström, the latter of whom was also the founder of Unibet and Kambi, challenger brand kwiff has looked to stand out in the UK and Ireland by putting entertainment at the very heart of its offering.
Built on in-house technology, kwiff’s flagship feature is ‘supercharged’ bets, whereby odds and cash-out offers can be randomly and unexpectedly boosted. The lucky customers and their inflated odds are displayed in real time on kwiff’s homepage.
For CEO Charles Lee, who spent a decade at bespoke bookmaker Fitzdares before joining privately owned kwiff in 2019, the supercharged aspect generates “huge retention value”. That’s helped, he notes, by the fact it is built natively into the product rather than being a CRM-related promotion you might find with some rival operators.
What’s more, it is set to be rolled out for casino and players’ deposits. “We’re going to supercharge the whole experience,” he says proudly from the company’s West London HQ during an interview with EGR.
EGR: You joined kwiff in 2019 as head of sportsbook, before stepping up to the CEO role in 2020. How do you reflect on those five years in the hot seat?
Charles Lee (CL): The growth in the past five years has been fantastic. We’ve had a strategic approach, so we’ve grown in a sensible but aggressive way. We’ve been a profitable company every year, so now it’s about the next stage. It’s about how we get more people to know about kwiff and about how we keep innovating and improving the product to keep giving that entertainment factor to customers.
I think a key point of being CEO is to focus on what is the right thing to do that’s best for our customers and what’s going to grow the KPIs and profitability. That’s what I look at every day. I look at where we sit in the market and try to weave our way through what is a tricky territory, the UK.
We’re selling an entertainment product, through sportsbook and casino, and we’re trying to innovate with our technology […] we play the game a little bit differently to how others do, and that’s where we’ll win. We don’t have thousands of employees – I want the technology to do the heavy lifting and the right people directing that technology.
EGR: Kwiff owns its products and tech, but which other parts of the operation are outsourced?
CL: Certain things that are not our core business. We’re not a cloud service provider, so we use AWS. We’re not an SMS delivery mechanism, so we use different integrations for that. We’re not a CRM execution tool, so we use Xtremepush. We also use tools to give our employees the best way to analyse and understand data. But in terms of sportsbook, casino platform and the rewards engines behind them, those are all ours.
EGR: What’s the benefit of having proprietary tech platforms?
CL: We have the choice of doing anything we want – it’s one of the key advantages. It allows us to move fast […] we can adapt based on the data. We own our database, so we can tap that and do A/B testing. We can do all these little things that show us the root of what’s working and what isn’t. We can benchmark against others in the industry and create our own USPs to give the player a better experience than they would receive elsewhere in the market.
If you look at others who use third-party technologies, we control our roadmap. We’re not waiting for someone else to develop something. We can pick and choose if there’s third-party stuff we want to integrate into our product, or we can build it ourselves. Our tech stack has developed over the last nine years to get to the mature stage it is at today.
But we’re always looking at those different features and advantages within a modular system to try to improve it. For example, we’re embracing AI within our information architecture to bring a tailored product to the customer […] we can personalise the product to each user, which isn’t always the case for third-party products. Some do that very well, but we can win if we get it right.
EGR: One of kwiff’s unique features is that a customer’s bet or cash-out can be randomly ‘supercharged’ at any time, potentially resulting in significantly inflated odds and cash-out. How does it work and how important is it as a product differentiator?
CL: I can’t tell you exactly how it works because that’s the secret sauce. We were the first operator to create that experience within a sportsbook – it’s native to all our products, so any player can be ‘supercharged’ at any time. It’s a good example of how we try to build features that are natively part of the product rather than being a CRM campaign.
It’s always there and gives customers an unbelievable deal, and they get that entertainment value from placing the bet […] a customer’s odds can epically improve within the betslip, and they get animations and pop-ups. It’s coming to casino and customer deposits in the next couple of months, so we’re going to supercharge the whole experience.
EGR: Does it boost your retention rates?
CL: It has huge retention value. We have great retention metrics compared to the rest of the industry. What that shows us is customer behaviour is changing a little bit towards that entertainment value. If people are streaming [TV shows] or going out to dinner, they want that entertainment factor. People aren’t just looking for a vanilla casino or sportsbook experience; they want that little bit extra. We see it in all our KPIs that they keep coming back, which is great. It has enormous value – I don’t want anyone copying it!
EGR: Are you surprised that no tier-one operators have done just that – build their own version?
CL: A lot of people don’t just sit on modular platforms like we do. You’ve seen others move towards that entertainment experience – you might have an acca boost with Ladbrokes or a betslip bonus with bet365 – but those are more CRM features. They’re not native with randomness and excitement.
EGR: Kwiff ran a series of memorable TV ads not long after it first launched in 2017. Are there any plans for another TV campaign in the near future’?
CL: Our strategy is more on the digital side. That’s because you can attribute those channels a little bit better. TV is more wide-reaching but it’s hard to get that attribution nailed down. If you stay up late and watch TV, there’s a lot of players in the market advertising by those means, but you [should] want to fill the funnel with all different digital channels before you get to that stage. We’re all about looking at the best opportunities where our customer base sits and what suits the brand.
EGR: What are the advantages of being a challenger brand?
CL: Others might have more marketing budget. So, they might be on TV but don’t have to worry about return on investment. They’re looking at purely growing scale and they might be publicly listed and have metrics they want to deliver to their shareholders. We’re not playing that game. We’re building a strong business for our shareholders, but in the right way. In the last seven or eight years within the UK, a lot of companies have come and gone, and that’s because their strategy was wrong.
They’ve misjudged the market, and they haven’t thought about the long term […] but we’re still here and we’re growing. You need to be smart – you can’t build everything that’s out there. Others have either a scale or budgetary advantage, or they have just been around longer. You need to use your platform smartly to deliver impactful things for the customer. We invest a lot in personalisation. We invest a lot in new and innovative features that we think are going to drive the right players to us.
EGR: What’s kwiff’s estimated market share in the UK?
CL: That’s a good question because it depends on how you look at the UK market. To qualify what I just said, how big is the black market in the UK? That’s an increasing challenge for all regulated operators. I’m pleased to see the [Gambling] Commission starting to address that problem, which I think they denied was a problem for many years.
I’m pretty restrictive with certain cookies on my phone but every day I get a message from a black-market operator or non-GAMSTOP stuff saying, ‘Come join us’. There are few reports and no real hard evidence of how big that market is today. Judging how big we are is difficult, but among regulated operators, I’d say we’re probably in the top 15. Our goal is to get up into the top 10 or top five.
EGR: You’re saying the threat from the black market is growing?
CL: If there’s a constant increase of regulation on the product and information players have to share with operators, which they find increasingly frustrating, that’s probably a good reason for them to go to the black market. That’s what nobody wants, and probably not what the player wants either.
If you look at taxation [on UK operators], there’s a consultation to unify the tax rate but that’s [casino] unlikely to go down to the 15% it is for sportsbook – it’s [sportsbook] more likely to increase to the 21% it is for casino. That has serious implications for sports, official rights, operators and the player. Ultimately, that cost will be passed on to the player, so they’ll be getting a worse deal.
It needs to be realised that the UK market is not growing in line with other industries, or even in line with inflation. Increasing taxes feels like an easy thing for a government to do, but it’s actually relatively short-sighted if you want to increase net taxation. That’s because you’re probably taking from a smaller pool, as more operators will leave and it becomes a less attractive territory for new operators to come in and grow, which provides jobs and increases taxes on the whole.
We’ve already seen a tax increase effectively with the 1.1% [statutory] levy, but I don’t know what a tax increase would do to horseracing, which is funded by media rights and the gambling industry.
EGR: Do you have any immediate plans for expansion outside the UK and Ireland?
CL: Our focus is growing our core business. We like regulated markets, but I don’t see us in the future being in just the UK and Ireland. I’d expect another regulated territory, but that’s probably something for 2026.
We want to keep innovating because about 50% of our business is technology. We’ve got some nice new UI and UX changes coming up, as well as some things for the football season that will be a first for the UK market. So, watch this space.
The post Kwiff CEO: “We have great retention metrics compared to the rest of the industry” first appeared on EGR Intel.
New entrants to the UK market have periodically come and gone, yet kwiff appears to be an exception to the rule. A loyal customer base, largely thanks to in-house tech and a sticky ‘supercharged’ feature, has turned it into a long-term profitable business, and Charles Lee seems determined to keep it that way
The post Kwiff CEO: “We have great retention metrics compared to the rest of the industry” first appeared on EGR Intel.