Innovation is a central theme to the daily goings on of most, if not all, organisations, with it also representing a key subject matter on the first day of this week’s CasinoBeats Summit.

With that in mind Phil Parry, CEO of Iforium, a CBS sponsor, has been addressing steps made throughout the year and what could be next for the industry.

Regarding where the future lies in growing the sector, Parry stated: “Compared to many other industries, gaming continues to lag behind in a lot of areas of tech development – so I see plenty of catching up happening.

“When it comes to development in general though, focus on knowing your customer, look after them, and the rest will follow. Aggregators will be doing a lot more to improve the process between the stakeholders it connects. 

“In this regard, our Gameflex platform acts as a bridge between multiple content providers. As the middleman, we ensure this is ‘sanitised’ in that all content meets the regulatory demand of whichever market it is required to operate in. 

“Where appropriate we also overlay our regulatory solution specific to the jurisdiction and local requirements needed to operate. Looking to the future; I believe this will be expected of every aggregator – taking such solutions from ‘nice-to-have’ to a ‘must-have’ requirement to operate.”

With so much talk surrounding the next big innovation, Parry moved on to talk through what has captured the most attention thus far in 2019: “There is plenty of industry innovation noise around blockchain, aggregated jackpots, split screen game play and such like – although in my view, it’s about timing otherwise a lot of this risks being window dressing. 

When it comes to development in general though, focus on knowing your customer”

“For us, it’s all about data, the processing of data and the player personalisation and communications that follow – those who master that this year will be the ones to watch.

“At Iforium, we’ve worked hard over the last year on our event driven architecture to provide a real time data stream of what our operators players are doing. Introduce and apply machine learning on top and you’re on to a winner.”

Before adding on which casino operator has impressed the most: “Those who are prepared to understand their customer and who engage accordingly with product innovation and technology responsibly always stand out for me.

“Who fits that criteria? I’m not going to say! Many have strengths but my preference would be to avoid naming them. At Iforium, we like to remain deliberately operator agnostic and avoid picking out any particular names – all are welcome in our growing family!”

Iforium is once again a supporter of the CasinoBeats Summit, which gets underway this week to welcome 1,000 delegates to West London, offering visitors four conference tracks and unrivalled networking opportunities with as many as 200 operators present, along with regulators, leading suppliers, payment companies and marketers.

CasinoBeats and the wider Betting on Sports is one of our favourite events in the industry calendar – and one we’ve been sponsoring since it started,” he says. 

“For us, it’s a great opportunity to catch up with our partners and also to make new friends. We enjoyed last year immensely as the event allowed us to open several new business leads and to progress on-going partnership discussions – so we’re looking forward to coming back for the same.”

The conference takes place at Olympia London on September 17-20, alongside Betting on Sports – learn more and buy tickets for the CasinoBeats Summit here.

To find out more about sponsorship and exhibitor opportunities at the Summit, please contact [email protected].