With the wraps freshly off ORAKO, the new sportsbook solution from global sports betting tech firm Sportradar, we spoke to its Managing Director of Managed Betting Services, Jacob Lopez Curciel, to learn more about this all-in-one product innovation.

As outlined at its official launch this week, Sportradar’s ORAKO solution brings to the marketplace a whole new offering for operators seeking a more convenient and efficient sportsbook approach. 

Underpinned by the firm’s full betting portfolio, ORAKO comes complete with a host of platform capabilities, betting products and marketing services. It has also been engineered to provide operators with a quick route to market and alleviate some of the operational pressures they face along the way. 

Explaining more about the solution, Managing Director of Managed Betting Services, Jacob Lopez Curciel, told CasinoBeats: “The ORAKO sportsbook is completely flexible. Operators can decide how to set themselves up and take from one to 100 per cent of the services we have. 

So, we can offer a fully managed service that includes everything we have in the sportsbook, or an operator might decide to take some of those services in-house and manage themselves. 

“Additionally, we can host third party services as part of the bespoke sportsbook solution. It’s all down to what the operators want.”

For operators looking to grow their business overseas, ORAKO is compliant in all major jurisdictions including new and emerging markets like Africa, Latin America and North America.

A key aim, according to Sportradar, is for ORAKO to free up some vital extra bandwidth for operators to enable them to focus on building player acquisition and customer retention.

Curciel noted: “It’s conceptually designed to be ready to operate very quickly. It just requires the operator to use their own player management services, or third-party player management services to put the operation in place. Once that’s happened, the time to market is really, really good.”

“The sports betting industry is hyper competitive, and customers can be demanding”

According to the MD, ORAKO also negates some of the constant pressure heaped on operators to keep on innovating and integrating the kind of new features that players constantly demand. “The sports betting industry is hyper competitive, and customers can be demanding. For some operators it’s hard to keep pace with the latest technological innovations, which is where we step in with ORAKO. 

“We’re continually updating our existing portfolio of betting products and services to ensure they drive effective engagement, while we have teams dedicated to innovation and product development to make sure we’re bringing new solutions to market for our customers” he said.

“Also, having one single point of contact to manage sports betting services and engaging with operators is a much easier and efficient way to signal accountability and how we take that accountability ourselves to make sure the sportsbook services runs end-to-end in an effective way.”

Curciel was also quick to underline the suitability of ORAKO for operators in the casino sector who seek additional income alongside their traditional igaming revenue. He noted: “One of the main strategic concepts of ORAKO is that those operators that are not specialists in the area of sports betting but are looking for additional revenue for their businesses can have the ORAKO sportsbook in a way that we fully manage it. It can open new business opportunities for them without the need to heavily invest in additional technology.” 

Expanding on some of the tools built into ORAKO that will be made available to operators, Curciel stated: “Sometimes operators will want to do the trading themselves – and they will have the same trading tools that our trading team have to enable them to do that. That is an important part of this solution – we don’t have different tools for our managed services. Operators can benefit from the tools that we use.”

He added: “It may be that an operator wants to have influence over their strategy and they engage with our teams to set up that strategy and agree that execution will be done by our teams. But in some cases, operators want to control every service, or some particular services and we make those tools available to them to do that.”