Andrew Daniels, group chief information officer, Betfred
It has been quite the journey for Andrew Daniels to get to where he is today as group chief information officer (CIO) at Betfred, leading a technology department of 450 staff. Having started off as a budding developer by building websites while still at school, Daniels’ first stint at Betfred was in July 2011 as head of mobile development.
He has also founded two businesses – design and development agency Degree 53 in 2013 and tech platform supplier Sharp Gaming four years later – both backed by Betfred owner Fred Done. The latter is where Daniels had Betfred on his books as his main client to build a new platform for the online and retail bookmaker, a project which took seven years to complete. Daniels was subsequently brought in as group CIO at Betfred when Sharp Gaming was absorbed into the business in 2024.
Getting to that point was not an easy feat, though. Daniels recalls: “I completely underestimated what it would take to build a full platform: PAM, sportsbook and gaming platform. After a couple of years of trying, Betfred bought me out and brought that in-house because they decided that if it was that complicated to do, and everyone else was struggling to do it, then why build it and share it with anyone else?”
The platform build process was not without its hurdles, since Betfred continued to work on areas such as KYC and gaming integrations during that period. Regulatory changes also cropped up along the way. For example, the bonus engine had to be rebuilt as a result of changes around promotions following an investigation into the sector by the Competition and Markets Authority in 2018 regarding unfair terms and practices. The key changes for online gambling firms to come out of the investigation included ending terms that forced punters to play multiple times before withdrawing funds and removing restrictions that could unfairly prevent players from taking their money out.
Another challenge Daniels faced was “misunderstanding the scope” of Betfred – a 55-year-old business at the time – and how that differed to a startup with no pre-existing process. Additionally, the project involved transferring data from the previous platform, which had proved tricky. “We did a data migration where-by customers logged into the old platform one day and logged into the new platform the next day, completely seamlessly. The bets were all there and they would settle. Trying to get data mapping between those platforms, we had to work out how to do that. It was a huge challenge,” Daniels explains to EGR.
The £100m project, which included building the whole omnichannel platform – website, apps, SSBT software, PAM, sportsbook, gaming aggregator, RGS, in-house games, back office and CMS – was completed after last year’s Grand National. The Warrington-headquartered operator saw an 89% surge in unique users during the 2025 Cheltenham Festival compared to the prior year, which Betfred’s group CIO believes shows “the business is absolutely flying”.
While at Degree 53, Daniels had experience of frontend development and design work for large platform businesses but openly admits he had not foreseen the complexities involved with creating a platform business (Sharp Gaming) from scratch. “Building an enterprise-level platform at this scale is a much different job to building websites and working in startups. It took me a few years to work that out, to be honest, and I’ve got the scars to prove it,” he quips.
In his role as group CIO, the division Daniels heads up is primarily based out of the technology head office in Manchester city centre. Within the 450-strong workforce, 200 people comprise the in-house development team, and an additional 60 positions are currently being recruited for.
Betfred now controlling its own technology brings a myriad of advantages such as the freedom to invest in areas it wants to. Daniels continues: “We’re so much more on the ball and able to resolve things faster. We’re also able to set product roadmaps that are unique to us and not just given to us by a supplier.”
Despite Betfred’s new platform being all encompassing, the 41-year-old says the operator has continued to work on product innovation, including launching a new betting market, Spot the Ball, in April where customers pick the goal scorer, the body part they score with and where they find the back of the net. There has also been behind-the-scenes work around automating bonuses, more responsive player safety interactions and more granular trading tools.
Part of the technology strategy has also centred on transforming ways of working, which involves shifting the focus from the technology department delivering projects for the business to a “product-operating model”. “It’s where you’re thinking of everything as a product from the end user’s perspective,” Betfred’s group CIO elaborates. “Pairing that with agile methodology, where you’re delivering small, incremental things very regularly, will help us catch and overtake our slower-moving competitors, we believe.”
Ian Botts, chief technology officer, Fanatics Betting and Gaming
Having been employed in tech for two decades, including at the likes of Microsoft and Amazon, Ian Botts was initially hesitant to transition to the betting and gaming industry when a recruiter reached out in 2019. Besides the occasional hand of blackjack in a land-based setting, Botts wasn’t much of a casino player. Nor was he a sports bettor. Moreover, he harboured a negative perception of the sector. “I was expecting this ‘bro’ culture and the technical problems to be not particularly interesting,” he says.
What Botts soon discovered after joining FanDuel in August 2019 was a “bunch of massive technical problems” that needed to be solved. “I found the space to be incredibly interesting and dynamic. Just the movement of data, the generation of odds – it’s an engineer’s fantasy land.
“And the people weren’t sports bros; it wasn’t this toxic male culture but an incredibly collaborative culture of a bunch of nerds who love stats and love numbers.” Two-and-a-half years later, in 2022, Botts had left FanDuel when he was presented with the chance to link up again with the operator’s old boss, Matt King, who was now (and still is) CEO at Fanatics Betting and Gaming (FBG), a subsidiary of sports merchandise giant Fanatics. “I like being the underdog,” Botts says, referring to FBG being a challenger operator.
What also piqued his interest about becoming CTO was the potential second-mover advantage with a well-funded household name like Fanatics. “Very few first movers end up becoming industry juggernauts,” he remarks. “Look at the streaming wars: we don’t talk about [music streaming service] Pandora awfully much. Spotify is now the dominant force because it was able to innovate. You see it over and over again – challenger brands push the boundaries of what is possible.”
The costly US landgrab in the giddy aftermath of PASPA’s repeal in 2018 centred around building products and trying to scale the tech, all at 100 miles per hour. Today, says Botts, priorities have shifted. “The industry has matured a great deal. Now, the problems we face are all about data, the ability to be dynamic with odds – it’s about taking some of the industry’s longest-standing traits and rebuilding them. For example, we use quantitative models to predict through simulations what is going to happen, but by its nature quantitative analytics requires the removal of as much noise as possible from the signal in order to make a prediction. With the rise of AI, we can start bringing these models online and give them context and make them much more interesting.”
FBG employs around 450 people across its tech functions, which is roughly half the headcount at the New York-headquartered business. FBG has also made a conscious decision to hire as much as possible from outside online gambling, especially from tech companies in Silicon Valley and the West Coast of the US. Fresh experiences and perspectives are important for an industry sometimes accused of being insular. “In order to innovate and break boundaries, you have to bring in technologists who are working in environments where they are solving very ambiguous problems and not following standard patterns of recognition,” Botts notes.
Of course, being a digital business means FBG relies tremendously on its tech teams keeping the show on the road. “This is a technology- and product-first company rather than a business-first company,” he emphasises. “So, the engineering and product teams are not considered cost centres; they are value creators. Everything we do is digital and online. Matt [King] hammers home that we are a product and technology company, and the rest of the functions are there to support this vision.” FBG is also unique among gambling firms in that it is part of an ecosystem, be it Fanatics apparel, trading cards or collectibles – all accessed through a single login ID. Players then earn ‘FanCash’ on their activity to spend within the ecosystem. Botts, who likens it to Amazon Prime, says: “It’s an ecosystem that is very difficult for other people to replicate. It’s a rewards system that is meaningful to everyone no matter their spend.”
Finally, the tech team has been working on a stand-alone Fanatics Casino app for iOS and Android, along with a web version. Unleashed in early May in Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, this separate app is about acquiring casino-first customers rather than cross-selling sports bettors.
On the build process, Botts says: “We built our app stacks natively in [cross-platform programming language] Kotlin […] but it still gives the smoothness and UI experience of a full native app.” It also provides the capability to “modularise” the product. “The new casino app is gorgeous,” he enthuses. “It’s still blinking lights but it feels like stepping into a nice casino. It feels so premium.” Chatting to FBG’s CTO for around 30 minutes and hearing his passion for the job and the industry, it’s clear he was right to pick up that recruiter’s call.
The post Sound bytes part two: Tech chiefs on their priorities and industry trends first appeared on EGR Intel.
In the second and final installment of this series, EGR chats to Andrew Daniels, group CIO of Betfred, and Ian Botts, CTO at Fanatics Betting and Gaming
The post Sound bytes part two: Tech chiefs on their priorities and industry trends first appeared on EGR Intel.