Month: May 2022

Thirty years ago, the author Neal Stephenson published Snow Crash, a sci-fi novel with obvious biblical allusions about a pizza delivery driver for the mafia named Hiro Protagonist who discovers a “linguistic virus”.

Naturally, in 2021, the book would inspire a name change at a $500bn company.

The book contained the first known use of the word “metaverse”, a term that quickly gained influence within the tech sector, with the developers of Second Life among those getting on board.

But to most, the word didn’t mean much until Mark Zuckerberg announced last year that his business would change its name from Facebook to Meta.

“From now on, we’re going to be metaverse-first,” he declared.

That quickly spawned a wave of searches for the metaverse and greater consumer interest than ever before.

“After Facebook renamed to Meta, I think hundreds or even thousands of different metaverses were created and the prices in them shot up,” Evoplay chief commercial officer Vladimir Malakchi says. “I think you can buy a flat in the metaverse for the same price as you can buy a real one.”

Next big thing?

Since that moment, the metaverse became one of the hot topics in the future of gambling.

Entain has been perhaps the most notable adopter. Earlier this year the global betting and gaming giant announced the launch of a new “global innovation hub”, which will invest £100m in “disruptive technologies” including those for the metaverse.

The World Poker Tour, meanwhile, claimed it had taken “the poker world’s first step into the exciting metaverse” when it launched an NFT poker club.

“It’s become a very hot topic,” Beter CEO Gal Ehrlich says. But gambling is just one of many sectors figuring out how to dip its toe into the metaverse. Estimates of its value have been sky-high, with Bloomberg Intelligence analysts arguing it could reach $800bn by 2024. Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak went a step further, claiming that its value could peak at $8tn.

And yet if you asked one of the executives championing the technology what it actually is, it’s unlikely you’d get an answer in less than 100 words. If you asked two people, there’s a good chance they’d disagree.

“We’ve got a vague sense of what things currently exist in what we call the metaverse,” Relax Gaming chief product officer Simon Hammon says. “I don’t think anyone truly understands or knows what it actually is.”

Interoperability

A common theme of every definition is that the metaverse is some form of digital world, but as Funfair Technologies chief operating officer Lloyd Purser points out, digital worlds have been around for a long time: many of the world’s most popular video games are set in one.

“Go to Google and type ‘what is the metaverse’ and you’ll get a broad definition, which says ‘a space where humans can participate in a shared virtual universe’,” he says. “So Fortnite is a metaverse. World of Warcraft is a metaverse. The metaverse is not new. Have you ever played an MMO? That’s a metaverse.”

So what exactly is new? Did Mark Zuckerberg stamp a word from a sci-fi novel on a feature of video games beloved by children and begin an $8tn investment frenzy? Well, not exactly. While there might be previous virtual worlds, Rarerthings founder Stefan Kovach says that the current metaverse has one key feature that makes it different.

“In my mind, there are very much Web 2.0 metaverses such as Fortnite and Roblox, our 3D immersive environments that people generally play in and socialise in,” he says.

“The shift that’s taking place is one whereby those metaverses will increasingly be built on Web3, on blockchain technology.”

What that means, he explains, is that players are able to demonstrably own certain items within their virtual world, typically through non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

“The reason behind that is predominantly around ownership,” he says. “It’s enabling ownership of the land, of items in the game. Merchandise, stuff that you buy within the metaverse, all manner of things that you can imagine in the real world, in theory can be created and sold and interacted with in a metaverse environment.

“And that actually creates a very different dynamic, which enables these economies to be created, which are decentralised and controlled by the community.”

But ownership still exists in Web 2.0 digital worlds – video games such as Fortnite have skins, weapons and items that players can own. What’s new is the type of ownership.

“If you look at esports gaming right now, it still doesn’t act as a metaverse, because there’s no strong financial incentive to drive that level of connection,” Ehrlich says. “That financial incentive can be reached once third-party entities allow different games to talk to one another.”

Whereas item ownership in Web 2.0 is typically registered on one company’s servers, ownership of non-fungible tokens is recorded on the blockchain. As a result, you can own items across a range of games.

“There’s a word in the blockchain world – interoperability,” Purser explains. “Let’s take this fashion NFT exchange as an example. So Gucci create a limited edition run of T-shirts and they’re for sale on that fashion exchange. And then you want to have an avatar in The Sandbox. You have an avatar in Decentraland and you have another, you have avatars in other metaverses.

“You can then basically wear that limited edition Gucci digital clothing in any metaverse, because it has interoperability across metaverses. That doesn’t happen in a centralised world because your items in general and your currency is limited to that particular game or metaverse.”

Tokens in the metaverse can be more than just aesthetic, though. Purser also mentions how certain tokens can give players ownership of aspects of the game itself.

“If you hold these governance tokens, you can vote on the future of what happens with the product. What happens with the economy, what happens with the loyalty, all of these things.”

An immersive experience

But what does that mean for the gambling industry?

Most obviously, it seems like a way to bring a level of immersion that would usually be associated with video games to gambling products.

JNS Gaming’s LynxBet brand is one of the few gambling operators that is already building something for the metaverse. Chief executive Jeremy Taylor says that while this is more of a landing area for now, it’s a chance to stand out from existing operators whose websites largely look similar.

“We’ve started to create our own small metaverse world effectively, in which customers can come and play these different products,” Taylor says. “Quite frankly, if you go to most online gambling websites, these days it’s the same games, with the same housing, just with different colours and a different name.

“We didn’t want to do that; we wanted to build our own frontend to tap into this opportunity to offer the right differentiated customer experience.”

Meanwhile, Malakchi has spent much of his career attempting to bridge the gap between gambling and video gaming with products such as a first-person shooter inspired slot, and he sees the metaverse as the perfect environment to facilitate that work.

That immersive environment, he says, may combine the experience of the most exclusive land-based resorts with the convenience of online gambling.

“I know a lot of gamblers are dreaming of coming to Las Vegas to spend their time there, to [enjoy] these kinds of entertainment,” he says. “I haven’t been to Las Vegas myself, but what I perceived when speaking with different people who are in Macau and Las Vegas, they said that they are [experiencing] another kind of emotion.

“And the metaverse will give an option to different people, who I don’t know, have no resources or no time, doesn’t matter what, but they can’t come to Las Vegas or to Macau or other big casinos, to feel that inside.”

Simon Hammon is a bit more sceptical. If you had the ability to visit not just anywhere in the world, he wonders, but also take in experiences not possible in real life, would you choose a Las Vegas casino floor?

“Without doubt the traditional and current sense of casinos will need to adapt,” he says. “It could be a super exciting time but a lot of questions will need to be looked at in terms of actual casino content and its attractiveness.

“Will players in 10-15 years want to play a traditional slot in current form when it will compete with a much more interactive entertainment space? That’s unlikely, so the industry will need to evolve.”

The NFT effect

The other way the metaverse may change gambling is in the potential offered by certain types of NFT. Where normally a casino’s most loyal customers lose the most money, the metaverse may offer a chance to reward this loyalty through play-to-earn gaming.

“It can give you the ability to walk into different casinos and be recognised as a VIP and also to, in effect, earn a bit of the house edge by holding one of these NFTs,” Kovach says.

However, he notes, any promise of a casino where everyone always wins is probably too good to be true.

“There are play-to-earn models out there, frankly, which are Ponzi schemes,” he says. “But for the sustainable models […] it’s kind of a nice extra, rather than playing purely to earn. It’s a grind to play that way.”

But while he says questions will be asked about the attractiveness of casino content, Hammon doesn’t think the metaverse will represent the end of gambling altogether. Instead, he explains, the gambling products that succeed in the metaverse may differ significantly from the ones we know today.

“Just having a virtual experience or going in and spinning a slot wheel virtually will not be enough,” he says. “The whole gameplay, the mechanic, the player behaviour, I think will need to dramatically shift and to what I’m not sure. But without a doubt, it will need to change.”

However, Ehrlich thinks it’s unlikely that the fundamental underlying mechanics that have made existing games like slots so popular would have to be overhauled. Instead, he says, the changes will be in how the player engages with the game.

“The mathematical model behind the slot will probably remain the same, because they are very much built to create the right level of excitement and engagement for different player demographics,” he says. “But the thing that can be redeveloped is the whole user experience.

“From a flat, 2D screen display, you can create a very sophisticated 3D world, that’s one element, and the second is the social element. The ability to interact with different players in the same menu, to hold and trade digital assets, there are a lot of new opportunities that come from the metaverse that slots can build.”

To Andreas Koeberl, CEO of BetGames, operators and suppliers have to keep one key idea in mind when developing products for the metaverse: they should offer something that gives them appeal over non-metaverse equivalents.

“I think everything that puts the social aspect first – for example a virtual sports bar that you create specifically targeted to your community and with which you engage closely – is essential,” he says. “You always have to think about what’s the value of the metaverse, what makes it more valuable than the traditional mobile world?

“You have to ask: why should I spend my time there? Why should I stick around? It’s potentially simple to acquire and convert users, but retaining them is tricky.”

Entering the mainstream

That question of attracting and retaining users is likely to be key to the future of the metaverse. Social products tend to benefit from network effects, where they become more attractive to users if their friends also take part, so the question of whether metaverse gambling will succeed is heavily linked to the question of if it can reach a critical mass of users.

For Koeberl, who wrote his PhD dissertation on disruptive technologies, that depends on two factors.

“The academic concept here is the perceived ease of use, which tells you how possible it is to access and use this new technology,” he says. “The other aspect is the perceived usefulness, which tells you how much value the new thing actually creates. This refers back to what I was saying earlier, about products that can work in the metaverse. If I can do something already, what’s the value [of doing it in the metaverse]?

“So you have the perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness. If one of these is poor, the new technology won’t emerge into the mainstream.”

And that’s a major reason why Hammon is more sceptical of the metaverse than most. “If you actually look at the gaming business as a whole, it’s not driving the cutting edge of technology,” he says.

“Ultimately, we need to cater for needs that rely on mass adoption and to be economically prudent. As an industry, mass adoption will dictate technology and platform development.”

If the industry is waiting for new technology to gain mass appeal, then it may need that new technology to improve to the point where it’s more palatable to a wider range of people. In particular, Ehrlich notes, there may still be work needed to create the augmented reality or virtual reality technology that could support a 3D metaverse.

“There have been companies exhibiting 3D slots at ICE for years and the only thing I remember about that is getting a headache after a few minutes,” Ehrlich says. “There are new items that when you use these you feel things are going in the right direction, but it’s still not there.”

Koeberl’s experience with immersive technology hasn’t been any better.

“I think the technology is a super enabling platform for the future but it’s simply not ready,” he says. “I need huge goggles, with five hours’ battery time, that may hurt my eyes or give me a headache.”

As metaverse businesses try to attract enough customers to make the product viable, who will be the early adopters? Given that the metaverse is a novel piece of technology that resembles video games popular with young people, the obvious answer would be young people.

However, Malakchi says that Evoplay’s data painted a more surprising picture.

When we started doing some analysis, we were sure that our early adopters would be people from 18 up to 22, 23 years old,” he says. “And this was a very big mistake from our side because when we studied it, we found the main early adopters are older than 30.

“The average age of people who are interested in these new technologies and also interested in gambling, it’s actually 34.”

Regulatory challenges

Beyond appealing to customers, though, there’s the question of regulation.

“The US is only just regulating online gambling,” Purser notes. “How the hell are they going to start regulating the metaverse?”

Kovach notes that regulatory uncertainty is why many gambling businesses have not taken serious steps to build something in the metaverse.

“When there’s a lack of clarity around regulation of new technology and the people with gambling licences, and that’s their entire business, they’re understandably going to be cautious and be a bit slow,” he says.

Much of that concern deals with fears of regulators smothering metaverse gambling in tight rules that make it effectively unworkable. But Taylor notes that an entirely unregulated metaverse space could lead to serious harm.

“If there isn’t the same scrutiny in the metaverse as there is outside of it, then it’s really dangerous, to be honest,” he says. “Ultimately everyone will lose if the customers get harmed.

“If the protections to safeguard them aren’t in place, it’s just going to create a really bad name for these worlds and online gambling in particular.”

He also notes that while some regulators may be slow to adapt, the Isle of Man authorities – which licensed LynxBet – have been “forward-thinking” when it comes to new technologies, albeit “with a lot of controls and policies in place that you need to comply with before you get your licence”.

But to Ehrlich, the question of what will and won’t be permitted when it comes to the metaverse is much more philosophical than regulatory.

“I look at this from two different dimensions; the first is regulatory authorities, the governments, and also us as a society, as in what we will accept and what we won’t,” he says.

“From a social point of view, it could swing between a black and a white market. If it’s not properly governed and monitored, it could become a real wild west, and ultimately find itself coming to a very disappointing end. The operators behind the metaverse, the big players behind it, are already very sensitive to the social implications of not doing it properly.”

While there are plenty of metaverse champions in gaming, Koeberl is adopting a “wait and see” approach for now. After the initial wave of interest following Facebook’s name change, search interest in the metaverse has drastically cooled off and the real
game-changing products may still be years away.

“For the metaverse, I currently see user experience and value as key blockers,” he says. “Technological readiness is pretty low, and of course from a market readiness level, just think of the challenges around KYC, AML and even IP and player protection.”

Hammon has similarly mixed feelings on the subject. He notes that, at least for now, he’d find it hard to imagine a metaverse gaming opportunity that would make him feel a need to get on board.

“Platforms like Facebook have laid out what their vision is, but there are plenty of questions about how it’ll be achieved,” he says. “If a gaming company today presented a similar vision, there’d still be as many unknowns.”

So for now, as metaverse gambling businesses hope to convert sceptics, the crucial step that will determine if the product can reach critical mass may come from somewhere outside of the gambling industry. 

Rhodes became interim chief executive two months after Neil MacArthur stepped down in March, being appointed for an 18-month term while the regulator searched for a full-time replacement.

He had previously held senior roles at the Department for Work and Pensions and the DVLA, as well as serving as registrar and chief operating officer at Swansea University.

During his time as interim chief executive he worked with the government on the review of the 2005 Gambling Act. Also during his time in charge, the regulator published a set of new rules for high-risk customers, including banning marketing to those classed as high-risk. These rules are due to come into effect on 12 September after further guidance is issued in June.

Now, the Commission has announced he will remain as CEO indefinitely after his 18-month term ends. His selection as permanent CEO had long been rumoured, after media reports in January said he would continue on in the post.

“Now the Commission’s permanent chief executive, Andrew will continue to work closely with chair Marcus Boyle, the board of commissioners, and the commission’s senior leadership team to ensure Great Britain’s gambling industry is regulated strongly and effectively,” the regulator said. “He will also continue his stakeholder engagement programme with consumers, industry, parliamentarians and those with lived experience.”

Last month, Rhodes told iGB that operators need to rethink how they conceive of affordability, while he also said that he was not concerned that any upcoming changes brought about in the review or high-risk customer rules will drive players to the black market.

As an IBIA member, Coolbet, which was acquired by GAN last year, will share its integrity-related data with a network of operators across the globe in order to help flag suspicious betting activity to sporting bodies.

Together, IBIA members account for €115bn (£98bn/($122.75bn) in global annual turnover.

“We are very pleased to be part of the IBIA,” said Endre Nesset, senior vice president of global sports at GAN. “There is strength in numbers and power in unity, and together with the rest of IBIA’s members we are in great position to help maintain integrity and stop foul play in our industry.”

Announcement of Coolbet’s membership comes just over a month after the operator was approved for a licence in Ontario. As part of the standards for sports betting in Ontario, operators must join an integrity monitoring body such as IBIA.

IBIA has welcomed a number of new members recently. These include the ComeOn Group – which was also recently approved to launch in Ontario – and VBet.

The association also revealed last month that it had flagged 42 suspicious betting alerts in Q1 of 2022, a major drop from both Q1 of 2021 and Q4 of that year. Tennis was the sport with the most reports, with 14.

Who is Community Gaming?

Community Gaming’s platform lets users organise their own esports tournaments using blockchain contracts. The company started as an in-person esports tournament operator for gamers of all levels. In 2019, the company started using smart contracts to transform its platform into a hybrid one that allows users to organise and participate in competitions online and in person. 

“We were running events every single weekend as a grassroots esports tournament organiser. These were weekend events hosted at LAN centers, co-working spaces, bars, restaurants, and we would bring people together that shared a passion for games, like League of Legends, Hearthstone, Super Smash Brothers,”  said Chris. “Those are some of our biggest games, with 50 to 100 people on the weekends, and they would play for 5 to 6 hours, and a lot of times they would connect with friends and go have a drink after work.” 

One of the most significant pain points Community Gaming saw after hosting over 100 of these events was payments. They wanted to build out a platform, but when the pandemic hit, all of their events got shut down, and so they used that time to build out a platform to solve those pain points, around getting players paid quickly for a cheap amount and having it be transparent to the users. 

It’s been about a year and a half, and they’ve expanded from their main market in North America to Latin America and parts of Southeast Asia. Many are free to enter, and it’s also a tool for people to create tournaments in under five minutes. This can be a game developer, a gaming guild, or a young tournament organiser worldwide.

“They’ll be able to set up a tournament in under five minutes and pre-configure their payments using blockchain payment technology, typically built on top of Ethereum. We use Ethereum layer twos, like polygon B & B chain, and soon Solana to enable these fast and cheap payments, so players can get paid out instantaneously for a few pennies that we now cover as the platform and it abstracts away, the complexities that are normally associated with Blockchain Solutions,” added Chris. 

This means someone getting started and wanting to create a tournament for their community doesn’t have to know how wallets work. Neither do the players, and they don’t need to understand how smart contracts work. Community Gaming makes it super simple with a user interface to get started, create and pre-configure those payments, and that’s how they’ve been able to get to where they are with over 100,000 users playing in games.

Impacting Esports

Community Gaming’s platform has greatly helped in facilitating esports activities. The platform makes it easier for tournament organisers, who may not have the required resources or a huge team to run tournaments at scale, to create different types of esports tournaments under smart contracts. 

Chris explains that they wanted to create this software to make it extremely easy to set up tournaments in under five minutes and to be able to make automated payments. When you use their platform, you can create your tournaments, and it can be in any format, single, double, Round Robin, or Battle Royale mode, and you can do that in under five minutes. You can choose any compatible token that’s Ethereum-based and soon Solana-based, and the last step is to pre-configure your payouts. 

This is all done to abstract away any notion of wallets, wallet transactions, or smart contract interfaces. This means you can say first place gets 50% of what’s in this prize pool; Second place gets 25, etcetera all the way down to 64 individual payments that you can pre-configure.

Chris states, “The way this works is the money is held in escrow in an Ethereum-based smart contract, and this is really important because frequently, you’ll see issues in the esports industry where players are not getting paid on time. There are obviously horror stories of payments never arriving when they were promised they would and transparency issues.” 

You can send in this payment through the Community Gaming platform to fund your prize pool anytime after the tournaments are created. Players can join knowing that the money is in escrow waiting for them, waiting to be paid out to the winners, and it’s not a situation where someone can retract it and take the money back out. 

Once the money is in the smart contract, it’s held there in escrow, and it gets sent out through one click of a button by the tournament organiser. This makes it very simple to automate those payments and makes this a seamless experience for esports tournament organisers and gamers.

Leveraging the Blockchain

Community Gaming is an esports competition platform that claims to be the most comprehensive and cutting-edge competition platform. Community Gaming enables players, tournament organisers, and game developers to create, manage, and participate in esports competitions using blockchain technology through its robust and user-friendly interface. 

The company believes that the massive gains that the gaming industry can make are decentralized and accessible through web3 technology, allowing users to reward their time and action. The blockchain allows for fast, cheap, and transparent payments as players can get instant payments, and the fees are incredibly inexpensive.

Chris states, “You have this ability to have these much wider payment distributions and in emerging Markets like across Latin America, where we’re expanding quickly, this is really meaningful right as the ability to make a couple of dollars and not have been, the championship player, is a huge deal. So the ability to do these instant payouts, as they’re cheap, fast, and transparent are a big use case.”

Considering the NFT ecosystem, Chris also believes that NFTs can be applied to enhance these cosmetic game economies. “To know that this skin is one of, let’s say, 5,000 out there and maybe a famous streamer or famous Pro Player-owned it before you. This brings the idea of digital esports memorabilia, which is impossible in the Web2 worlds with centralised databases where you’ll have to trust the game developers and not be able to have this programmatic ability.”

Several financial services are built on top of NFTs and Tokens, and Chris is excited about the extensibility aspect of the secondary markets and these open game economies. Community Gaming also plans to support NFT payments on their platform very soon, as through this concept of “Play to Earn,” players can monetize their time and make money through playing games.

Under the arrangement, the organisation’s new OLG.ca affiliate program will be powered by the affiliate software of Income Access.

OLG.ca, which will also be managed by Income Access, launches as the first affiliate program for a provincial lottery and gaming brand in Canada, offering users online casino and sports betting, with the latter provided through the OLG’s PROLINE+ digital sports platform.

Paysafe has worked with the OLG since January 2015, processing payments for the OLG.ca online gambling platform.

“OLG has significant recognition as a trusted gaming and entertainment brand in Ontario,” OLG chief digital and strategy officer Dave Pridmore said. “Paysafe and its Income Access platform will help OLG continue to show Ontarians our market leading customer experience and products that are available at OLG.ca.”

Income Access’s vice president to of operations, Geoff Smorong, added: “The launch of the OLG.ca affiliate program marks a fitting landmark for the 20th anniversary of Income Access’ founding in Montreal. 

“As a company with deep Canadian roots, we’re proud to launch the country’s first provincial lottery and gaming affiliate program in partnership with OLG.ca, an iconic Ontarian brand.”

The launch comes after the Canadian province of Ontario officially opened its legal and regulated online gambling market last month, going live on 4 April.

The opening followed almost three years of work after the provincial government revealed plans to end the lottery’s online gambling monopoly in April 2019. The government in 2020 introduced legislation to allow for a licensing regime.

Betting turnover was 0.8% ahead of Tab NZ’s monthly budgeted figure of $221.7m, while net profit reached $15.3m, which was 2.7% above budget for April. Betting net profit was $14.0m, up 4.5% on budget, though gaming net profit was 13.3% below budget at $1.3m.

NZ also said operating expenses for the month were 4.0% below an initial budget of $10.0m, amounting to $9.6m, while code distributions and other payments were 3.2% above budget at $16.3m.

Tab said its above-budget performance came despite some impact to retail operations due to the omicron outbreak, with this leading to a reduction in foot traffic in the retail and hospitality sector. However, this eased towards the end of the month as the peak of the outbreak passed. 

Looking at individual events, the Courtesy Ford Manawatu Sires Produce Stakes (G1) at Awapuni was the most popular racing event, drawing $496,000 in wages. For sports, the rugby league match between Melbourne Storm and the New Zealand Warriors attracted $773,000 in bets.

In terms of financial year-to-date performance, net profit for the nine months through to the end of April was $124.4m, above budget by 0.7%.

Operating expenses for the period were 4.0% below budget at $86.4m, while distributions were 4.0% above budget at $134.2m.

Total revenue for the three months through to 31 March 2022 amounted to SEK12.0m (£975,986/€1.1m/$1.2m), down from SEK13.4m in the corresponding period last year.

Revenue from gaming operations and gaming-related services was 20.2% lower at SEK6.7m, with a 26.3% rise in B2B operations revenue to SEK2.4m being offset by a 33.9% decline in B2C revenue to SEK4.3m.

Scout noted the drop in B2C revenue was primarily due to the situation in Ukraine, saying a significant proportion of customers in this area of the business are from Eastern Europe and Russia. 

Meanwhile, capitalised expenditure was 7.7% higher at SEK4.2m, while other revenue also increased by 7.2% to SEK1.1m for the quarter.

As a result, total revenue was SEK12.0m.

The provider also said its switch to a new business model with fixed monthly revenue means that at the end of the year, Scout will have SEK1.3m in fixed monthly revenues. During the first quarter, none of the agreements with the fixed revenues were live, though launches are scheduled for the second quarter onwards. 

In March, Scout chief executive Andreas Ternström said the business would initiate a cost review after he was “not at all satisfied” with the supplier’s slow growth and rising expenses in Q4 of 2022.

“As communicated in the previous report, we have taken a number of measures to increase the revenue and decrease the expenses,” Ternström said. “Our new model with more fixed income has been received well and also decreases the risk for our operation and increases the transparency.”

When looking at costs for the quarter, total operating expenses were 9.5% higher at SEK33.5m, with the cost reduction strategy having only been announced towards the end of Q1. 

This left an operating loss of SEK21.5m, compared to SEK17.3m in the previous year. Scout did note SEK1.9m in income from financial items, which left a pre-tax loss of SEK19.6m, far wider than SEK9.8m last year after significant income from financial items that year.

Scout did pay any tax in the period, nor did it receive any tax-related benefits, meaning that it ended the quarter with a net loss of SEK19.6m, compared to the SEK9.8m loss at the end of Q1 2021.

In addition, Scout said its loss before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) doubled from SEK15.0m in 2021 to SEK30.2m this year.

“During the first quarter we focused on restructure the company with decreasing the expenses and to strengthen our B2B operations,” Ternström said.

“We have also been strengthened by the fact that our B2B customers now clearly see the value of our product, in terms of low acquisition costs for end customers and the high loyalty that our products deliver, which strengthens our business model.

“Concerning the expenses during the second quarter with around 40% and within our B2C operations we have decreased the marketing spend significantly. With this, in combination with the fact that we are launching new B2B customers, we will be able to uphold our prize pools at attractive levels and that our B2C operation can be adapted towards our B2B operations and therefore receive less focus.

“Our new focus – in restructuring and in the new customers we have signed in combination with the aggressive cost-cuts which we are now doing – is to create prerequisites which are required to meet our goal of showing a positive cash flow from operations during the fourth quarter of 2022. 

“The effects of the actions will partly be seen already during the second quarter but primarily during the second half of the year.”

Cachia takes on the role at Rhino after almost two years in the same position at William Hill International.

He spent nearly five-and-a-half years at William Hill International, also serving as director of commercial and gaming, head of commercial and marketing business controller during his time with the business.

Prior to this, Cachia worked as an export director for ALTA CARE Laboratories for almost 15 years.

“It’s fantastic to have someone of John’s ilk join our ambitious group; he has lots of very valuable experience, and I’m sure he will help drive further growth and develop all aspects of our commercial operations,” Rhino’s chief executive Ross Parkhill said.

The appointment forms part of a wider restructuring process at the group, with Murgovska also moving into the role of chief product officer.

Murgovska has been with Rhino since February 2020, starting out as head of product before going on to become director of product development.

Prior to this, she worked for Gaming Innovation Group (GiG) as product owner for platform after a spell as senior front-end developer. 

Murgovska also spent time with The Ear Ltd, Stanley International Betting and Karpa.

“Kristina is one of the sharpest product minds in the business and I am delighted to see her talent recognised,” Parkhill said.

The event – the main domestic knockout competition in Romanian football – will now be known as the Betano Romanian Cup. The new sponsorship comes as the format of the competition has also been changed with the aim of raising interest in the event.

“Through this new competitive format, we aim to be closer to the supporters of all clubs in Romania, regardless of the league they compete in, because the Romanian Cup represents the heart of football,”  Răzvan Burleanu, president of the Romanian Football Federation, said.

“The largest football competition in Romania, in which clubs from all levels of Romanian football participate, receives the support of Betano in the year in which it was reinvented by implementing a new competitive format t make it modern and much more attractive and dynamic, in order to improve level of play and strengthen the club’s relationship with its own supporters. 

“I am sure that the support of the new main partner will contribute to the growth of this traditional competition in the coming years.”

Julio Iglesias Hernando, chief commercial officer of Kaizen Gaming, which owns Betano, said the deal showed Betano’s commitment to sport.

“The partnership with the Romanian Football Federation, the most important football association in Romania, aims to support one of the largest national senior competitions and strengthens our commitment to performance sports,” he said. “We are proud that in the coming seasons the players and fans of elite football in Romania will gather under the umbrella of the Betano Romanian Cup.”

Last month, it was announced that European lotteries giant Allwyn, formerly known as Sazka, will acquire OPAP’s 36.75% stake in Betano. However, OPAP will retain its stake in Kaizen’s Greece-facing brand Stoiximan.

The partnership covers the upcoming FIH Hockey Women’s World Cup as well as the FIH Hockey Pro League seasons in the Netherlands, from now until June 2025.

BetCity.nl will be visible for the first time at the FIH Hockey Pro League matches that will be played in Nijmegen, Netherlands, at the end of May.

Commenting on the partnership, FIH CEO Thierry Weil said: “We’ve been looking at engaging with the betting industry for some time now, but it was essential for us to do so in a completely trustful environment.”

“Thanks to our collaboration with Sportradar, we’ve found in BetCity.nl the ideal partner to open the doors of the betting market to hockey. This first-of-a-kind move for us will hopefully generate further similar opportunities in this area in the future.”

“The Netherlands have been among the world’s top teams in hockey for years. As a 100% Dutch company, we are proud to be affiliated with the FIH and therefore being visible at matches in the Pro League and the Women’s Hockey World Cup of our national team,” continued Melvin Bostelaar, BetCity.nl’s CEO.

The partnership between BetCity.nl and FIH was made possible by Sportradar – the FIH’s official betting and gaming data rights partner.

BetCity was one of the initial licensees in the Netherlands and recently joined the International Betting Integrity Association in February, reiterating its commitment to safe and responsible gambling.

Operators within the Netherlands have been required to partner with an international integrity monitoring body since the gaming market launced in October 2021.