Product & technology – FairOdds Network

March 18, 2025

Kalshi, Robinhood partner for March Madness following cease-and-desist extension

Kalshi and Robinhood have partnered again to offer sports contracts, this time ahead of the NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments.

The renewed partnership was announced by both sides on Monday (17 March). Robinhood will launch a standalone prediction market hub in its app, made possible through Kalshi. According to Front Office Sports, Robinhood had just under 25 million users as of last November.

The first markets will be on the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments, which begin on Tuesday (18 March) and Wednesday (19 March), respectively. There will also be contracts listed for whether the Federal Reserve will change the federal funds rate at its May meeting.

Last month, the exchanges partnered to offer Super Bowl contracts, but Robinhood quickly backed out following pushback from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Kalshi and Crypto.com, another entrant into the prediction space, kept their Super Bowl contracts active before and during the..

March 14, 2025

BetMGM learned from its marketing and spending mistakes, Hornbuckle confident in US product roadmap

MGM Resorts CEO Bill Hornbuckle is confident its BetMGM JV with Entain will increase its EBITDA by $250 million (£193.3 million/€229.9 million) in 2025, thanks to ongoing product updates including single-game parlay, omnichannel and single wallet.

Hornbuckle told the audience at JP Morgan’s Gaming conference on 13 March that, while BetMGM is not the fastest product in the US market today, it is now twice previous iterations.

“I know we’ve stopped losing share,” the CEO said. “I think we see a lot of green shoots particularly in January, February and March. Everything we’ve seen would suggest the projection we’ve given is real and we can hit that target.

“The flow through is about 70%, I would say historically we did some things that we’ve learned from, marketing wise and expense wise.”

Reflecting on these “mistakes,” Hornbuckle said the operator had spent $13 million on a Super Bowl ad in 2023, which he acknowledged “wasn’t the greatest idea”.

“Nor was it a great commercial, t..

January 29, 2025

iGB@ICE: Werner Becher on the first six months of his Kambi tenure

Werner Becher had a tough act to follow, taking charge of Kambi from Kristian Nylen, but he says it’s been a case of refining an ongoing transformation process to build out a modular product range from a turnkey business.

Speaking in the iGB@ICE studio, he reflects on the first six months of his tenure, including launching for clients in Brazil on 1 January, when the market opened.

Going forward he aims to change the perception of Kambi from a turnkey specialist to a premium sportsbook solutions provider. This increases the supplier’s addressable market, Becher explains

Flexibility is key to the renewed and refreshed Kambi, Becher says. And he admits that Kambi was perhaps too reliant on a small number of partners previously. By offering solutions that allow the sportsbook technology provider to tap into a wider range of clients, there is scope to add far more customers.

Kambi remains a premium proposition

However it remains a premium sports betting product, meaning it’s not l..

January 28, 2025

iGB@ICE: Rei do Pitaco CEO Kiko Augusto on the pivot from fantasy to sports betting

Kiko Augusto, CEO of Rei do Pitaco, shares insights with iGB@ICE on the company’s journey from a daily fantasy sports (DFS) platform to becoming one of the 14 fully-licensed sports betting operators in Brazil.

Drawing inspiration from the examples of DFS-turned-sports betting giants DraftKings and FanDuel in the US, Rei do Pitaco has built a tech-driven product tailored to Brazilian users.

With a strong user base migrated from fantasy sports, Rei do Pitaco is aiming to utilise its DFS origins to deliver an entertaining Brazilian sports betting experience.

“Back when we started the company in 2019, there was no daily fantasy for cash prizes as there were in the US,” Augusto explains to host Katie Goldfinch.

“We followed the playbook of DraftKings and FanDuel. “We’re going to acquire a lot of customers that play fantasy sports for cash prizes and now we’re in the regulated market with a big user base of customers that like sports.”

January 28, 2025

iGB@ICE: The intersection of sports and gaming with Brendan Bussmann and Adam Sachs

We’re talking sports in the iGB@ICE studio, with Adam Sachs, counsel and senior policy advisor at Dentons. Sachs previously acted as chief counsel for MLB’s Kansas City Royals for three years and has been instrumental in helping the team forge relationships with the gaming sector.

In conversation with Brendan Bussmann, managing partner of B Global advisors, Sachs said the team was looking to implement an “esports component” to any deal the team pursues in the future.

“We have a visionary owner in John Sherman with the Royals who saw that a sports stadium can unlock value for the ownership group but can also engage fans and bring them down to an engaging and exciting venue more often than they typically do in a place like Kansas City,” Sachs said of the innovation under way within the team.

Sachs also digs into the challenges faced by sports entities in partnering with the gaming sector, due to the built-in moral-based opposition against gambling.

January 10, 2025

2025 predictions: Brazil to remain fluid, adopting novel betting types, sponsorships may be reviewed

How will the gambling sector evolve in 2025? We asked the industry to consider how key trends in 2024 will progress into this year

Ushering in 2025, the sector has hit the ground running in preparation for ICE Barcelona in a couple of weeks. Across the pond a couple of US states have kicked off their legislative sessions this year with bills supporting online gaming launches. But the holiday period provided enough downtime to reflect on ways the gaming industry evolved in 2024 and then consider what will likely dominate the headlines and earnings calls in the year to come.

Brazil’s legal online betting launch captured the most eyes in 2024’s news flow, and how the licensed market will navigate its infancy stages will pique the sector’s interest in coming months. Last summer, 113 operators applied for early-stage licences to enter the market, hoping to be among the first to launch on 1 January.

Brazil’s SPA then awarded 66 approvals at the turn of the year, including 14 full and 52..

January 8, 2025

Sportsbook+ could be DraftKings’ tax saviour. But in the era of subscriptions, will consumers add one more?

On 28 December, DraftKings quietly launched a new subscription service, dubbed DraftKings Sportsbook+, for select customers located in New York. The new service, which allows for odds boosts on parlays, is the first of its kind – and it could be the company's tax saviour. But will bettors actually subscribe?

Essentially, Sportsbook+ allows subscribers to get better odds on parlays. Each applicable parlay must be at least two legs and each leg must have odds of -500 or narrower. For each leg added to the parlay, the odds would be improved by 10%. In other words, a two-leg parlay would be boosted 10%, a three-leg bet would be boosted 20% and so on. Parlays with 11 or more legs would be boosted by 100%, or double the original payout. The maximum applicable bet is $25.

The news of the launch was first reported by Sportico on 3 January.

DraftKings said the service would be available to “select, eligible customers” in New York, but didn’t elaborate on specific criteria. The fact t..

December 3, 2024

Experts: Legal obstacles stifle Vietnam sports betting

Vietnamese sports bettors gamble billions of dollars a year, but most of the revenue goes to overseas operators. Experts say the market is ripe for development if the government amends a 2017 decree.

Vietnam could grow a lucrative sports betting industry, given more favourable regulations. That was the consensus of business and financial experts at a 28 November seminar, hosted by The Investor and Vietnam’s Association of Foreign Invested Enterprises (VAFIE).

Decree 6: Cumbersome, unclear and ineffective

According to the Tuoi Tre News, the conversation centred on Decree 6, implemented in Vietnam in 2017. The legislation ostensibly opened the door to legal betting on horse races, greyhound races and international football. It also laid out a framework for sports betting operators.

But speakers at the Hanoi seminar said the rules are vague, prohibitive and out of step with the times.

For gamblers, Decree 6 limits legal gambling to 20 pilot jurisdictions in Vietnam and caps bets at ..

November 7, 2024

Sportradar ups 2024 forecast after record Q3

Sportradar has upped its 2024 financial outlook for the third successive quarter after delivering record Q3 figures.

In its financial results for the three months to 30 September 2024, Sportradar said betting and gaming content revenue and strong US market growth were the main drivers of success.

Revenue increased 27% year-over-year to €255.2 million, while adjusted EBITDA was up 30% to €65.8 million.

Sportradar now expects to achieve revenue growth of at least 24% to €1.09 billion and adjusted EBITDA growth of at least 29% to €216 million. In September, the group forecasted year-over-year growth of at least 21% in both revenue and in adjusted EBITDA.

Sportradar’s Betting Technology & Solutions division achieved growth of 32% to €210.1 million during the quarter. This was primarily driven by a 37% increase in betting and gaming content benefiting from existing and new customer uptake of products and premium pricing, as well as from strong US market growth.

Additionally, Managed ..

November 4, 2024

Rush to the polls, bet from anywhere: Prediction markets abound ahead of US elections

On 5 November, US voters will elect a new president and decide a litany of other political issues. What makes this election different from past ones is that investors – and bettors – have pounced on the rise of political prediction markets such as Kalshi.

Prediction markets, or derivatives exchanges that offer “yes/no” event futures contracts on current events like politics and pop culture, have been around for several years in relative grey-area obscurity. But a recent US federal court ruling appears to have opened the floodgates, at least for now.

On 2 October, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled in favour of Kalshi, a New York-based exchange whose senate- and house-related contracts had been delisted by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in June 2023. The CFTC argued unsuccessfully that the contracts involved gaming due to their speculative nature.

Kalshi, meanwhile, leaned into arguments that have similarities to those used for legalised sp..

October 23, 2024

What could the future hold for Kambi and OpenBet as platform consolidation slows?

Betting platform consolidation has slowed and as operators are turning to smaller, specialist technologies to bolster their sportsbooks, what does the M&A opportunity for incumbents like Kambi and OpenBet look like today?
In September a rumour that Genius Sports was eyeing a takeover of Kambi Group surfaced, resulting in both parties publicly dismissing the suggestion of ongoing talks. The chatter caused both share prices to dip briefly as the market considered what such a deal might look like.

One source at the time told iGB it wasn’t a good time for Kambi to get caught up in a buyout as it was navigating a transition period and ushering in new CEO Werner Becher. But analysts at Swedish investment bank ABG Sundal Collier have suggested that Kambi has been up for sale for a while.

When MGM announced on 24 June that it was acquiring Tipico’s US betting platform to help it move into Brazil and bring its LeoVegas European betting offering onto an in-house tech stack, ABG Sundal Colli..

October 23, 2024

What could the future hold for Kambi and OpenBet as platform consolidation slows?

In September a rumour that Genius Sports was eyeing a takeover of Kambi Group surfaced, resulting in both parties publicly dismissing the suggestion of ongoing talks. The chatter caused both share prices to dip briefly as the market considered what such a deal might look like.

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Tag: Product & technology