Today the talk with Salvatore Messina – the COO of Betstarters. With more than 15 years of experience in the IT area and strong knowledge in betting, he shares his vision for the future of Betstarters company and the gaming industry in general. 

How has the industry evolved and where do you see it going?

The industry moves into new regulated markets, where regulated gaming and the control of the regulators allow you to have a stable and reliable business with the utmost protection of your players. Africa is in the targeted by many operators, as it is a very interesting but very complicated market.  Skills and investments are needed to obtain results! America is instead the direction of the big gaming operators; they are already almost all ready and positioned for this new amazing market. In terms of offer I believe that the revenues form the esports will grow exponentially.

How did the pandemic change the industry and your company?

We have noticed the need of the retail operators to expand or even start from scratch the online operations. By using multiple marketing tools the traffic from the initial land based retail points is moved online. I’m referring to cases, where brands that always wanted to move their business (or at least part of it) online but really never had the right opportunity and sometimes the courage to make this drastic change within their operational flows. The pandemic gave the opportunity for those brands to move their traffic online, increasing their numbers thanks to the continuous growth of the online revenues in our industry. Betstarters have honestly represented the perfect solution for those brands. We are also providing a webretail system, which is totally integrable and already part of our online platform. It gives our customers the perfect opportunity to split their operations.

What is your vision for the future of the company?

Our company is young and it’s growing fast, as for today we are present in 7 different licensed African Markets, South America and Eastern Europe. We are now adding even more functionalities to our platform with a particular focus on the markets we would like to target, perfectly knowing the specific needs of each one of them. The idea is to become a well recognised B2B brand in certain regions, and to expand worldwide accordingly. We provide white label solution and turnkey solutions ready to go in multiple countries, ensuring our clients are in  the most comfortable position possible and delivering all the needed PSP’s (our system has many payment solution of any kind already integrated, strategically chosen to cover the regions we are targeting, and we are always open to add some new payment option), diversifying our service from the competitors by the convenient balance in between delivery timings and quality. We constantly develop to make our platform richer and as much flexible as possible.

What are your advantages compared to the other software betting companies? 

Flexibility. This is the key word in Betstarters. We capture the needs of our customer and we sew the platform based on his indications and market requirements. The opportunity to add any language (easily translatable through our back-end) and any currency needed; the capability to customise the betting experience for each users, the site builder that let our clients customising each menus in our frontends; the usability and simplicity of our CRM, without mentioning the players, agent and retail managements that can simplify the operations of our clients, letting them easily create any kind of commercial network. These are just a few of the key points that are contributing to make the Betstarters platform one of a kind in the industry. Once again I would also like to mention the incredible balance between the quality of the realisation of any new implementation (from the smallest feature to the biggest) with the delivery times. This is also a big advantage, if you compare us with the realities in the market today. Same applies for the creations of any kind of promotions – which is something we are implementing even more to give our clients total independency on this point of view. And our commercial scheme is based on the reality of the markets we are working on, builded on the deep knowledge of the territories we are targeting, which gives us the opportunity to deliver the best pricing system for the exact use case we are facing.

What are the targeted markets by Betstarters?

As mentioned before, Africa is plays a significant role in our business, any kind of emerging markets is generating our interest, but African regions are on top of the list. Our platform became quite successful in a few different licensed territories there and we would like to follow this path. Many different payment options are already integrated, a system that has a deep knowledge of the local currencies being able to cover each aspect related to bet acceptance and risk management, an usability which has been studied for improving the average African user experience and the simplicity to fullfil any player needs. Besides Africa we are now focusing also on South and Central America, after a few experiences in Peru, Argentina and Paraguay, launching an interesting project in Panama. The ultimate goal would be to improve our portfolio in Europe, with a particular attention to the Easter Europe market, as besides cooperating with one of the biggest Montenegrin operators. We are also investing a lot by opening an office in Romania and carrying on multiple projects related to those markets.

What are your goals for the next two quarters of 2021 in terms of product? 

In terms of product we are now working on the addition of a few interesting features, some of them will improve our presence in certain markets. One of them is an internally developed Sportsbook Jackpot product which will let us shine even more within the African regions. Will also improve the players experience by adding few features into the player panel to let them experience their betting journey in the most complete and enjoyable way possible. As we constantly develop, many surprises are in the making for our customers. For example a new bonus management system and new promotions available into the platform, with the possibility to see all these improvements in the new version of our back-end that we are going to release soon.