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A daily podcast delving into the biggest stories of the day throughout the sports betting and igaming sector.
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Welcome to the iGaming Daily podcast, analyzing the news from the betting and gaming industry all over the globe, supported by OptiMove, the number one CRM marketing solution for the iGaming market. Horse racing is a classic of the gambling sector, with punters in their droves heading to racetracks and their mobile devices every week to place bets on the races. But the sector faces some challenges and is going through a period of modernisation. So against this backdrop, what do global operators need to do to properly modernise their horse racing betting solutions and appeal to the younger generations of players coming through? And what are the revenue upsides of investing in horse racing betting? Welcome back to iGaming Daily, supported by Optimove, the creator of positionless marketing and the number one player engagement platform for sports betting and iGaming operators. I'm Charlie Horner and today I'm joined by Stephen Crisp, the managing director and CEO of Racing and Sports, and Jack Kellyher, the company's commercial director for the UK and Europe. Stephen, how's things? Thanks ever so much for joining us today. Hey, Charlie. Thanks for having me, mate. Yeah, no, it's wonderful to be on the show. Brilliant. And Jack, thanks for coming on. How are you? Yeah, good. Thank you. Fully recovered now from ice. So, ready to get on the phones and get some new business drummed up. Excellent. Brilliant. Well, since you're both guests on the show, I think it would be a great place to start by just introducing yourselves a little bit and perhaps give us a little bit of a glimpse into your background in horse racing and the betting sector. Stephen, how about you go first? Yeah, look, mean, Charlie, was born into racing, I guess. You know, it's been deep within my family for multiple generations. My pathway has kind of been a little bit unorthodox, I guess, in the sense that I um graduated from university here in Australia in Canberra with a technology degree and I joined all the big consulting firms as you do as a young uh fellow. But my father actually was oh well entrenched within the horse racing industry after successful careers within civil aviation and economics. And, you know, my career sort of, um, act very quickly from, um, you know, consulting into the family business, which was a startup at the time and relatively scary too, given we sort of went through that early days.com era boom bus cycle and the racing and sports brand was only very fledgling at the time. was a digital asset, um, susceptible to failure. lot of companies went under at the time. Um, fortunately we weren't one of them. We, we succeeded, um, at that time and managed to morph the company from a digital data media company into a very much a B2B business. And so I did that for many years before realizing that I had to go out and sort of earn my, my stripes and walk my own walk. So I went out for a good 15 years, built a company, moved overseas, lived in the UK for several years. Uh, and then coming back to Australia, starting my own company. And then obviously selling that. then that gave me a pathway back into racing and sports. And I never really left. It was always a very, very close connection with my father, but also the business and watching its growth trajectory and its ambition. I guess seeing the potential of that business, once I sold my company, gave me the ability to walk back in and really help strategize with the team about where we were going to take the business going forward. We identified very quickly international was a growth area for us. We had a lot of domestic customers. It still work to do domestically, but international was really where our growth trajectory was. So we, one thing led to another, we IPO'd the business. um became CEO and um I guess five, six years down the track, we are where we are today and we're growing rapidly, 30 % year on year um and continuing to get the racing and sports brand really out there as a global benchmark in the horse racing and wagering technology, data, content industry. Fantastic. Sounds like a great journey and talking of international business. Jack, how about you tell us about your background? Well, mine certainly didn't start with uni's at vertity degrees, that's for sure. My first experience into horse racing was sort of in the betting shops as a young 18 year old, not knowing what to do with the betting coupons on football uh and looking in the retail displays and seeing greyhounds and horse racing all over. and uh lots of high rewarding odds that are available to you. Placed a few winning wages and that was me hooked on the industry as an 18 year old. First professional role was at a risk management company called Willis Towers Watson, which many people will be familiar with, a big global firm. And then moved on to a company called Aon, who are the largest risk management firm in the world. That's where I first got introduced to sort of modeling as such, which now is sort of part of everything we do at racing and sports. And that led me to have opportunities, sort of building models, working with people that were smarter than me. I got involved in some syndicates and then spent seven years betting for myself full time working with software very much like we see in the market now, like your odds monkey and odds jam in America and the amazing tools that companies like Buckybashing.net, building the UK. So advantage playing, taking on soft lines. So nothing too skillful, but sort of just managing your money and your portfolio well. I did that for six, seven years and then moved to a company called Podium, or what was known as the Press Association, to head up their commercial team. That was where I met Stephen and Gary, the founders of Racing of Sports. It was me actually showing them the software that I built at the time was called ginger bets, which was just like an advantage tool for to help betters. think the guys like the product, but we got on really well. And weeks later, I was working with racing and sports and part of their UK journey and their startup when they IPO'd on the Australian Stock Exchange. yeah, been been a fun journey. uh seen a few different sides of it and really enjoying it leading the racing and sports commercial team now. Fantastic. Well, between the two of you, there's plenty of experience and lots of varied experiences of the industry. So plenty of expertise on horse racing on show today. And with that experience and expertise, what do you think is the biggest challenge facing horse racing today when it specifically comes to the betting sector? Jack, how about you maybe Go first on this one. Yeah, think fragmentation of for buyers is the is the obvious one. But I think there's actually been huge strides in that area. It's very complex for operators uh to to buy the racing product and bring it into their portfolio offering if they don't have a deep understanding. So the UK market where I sit, know lots of companies have a deep understanding there and it's in their DNA. But what we're seeing is more international. companies interested in this high yielding vertical and it is challenging and very fragmented, but there has been steps forward in that respect and I'm sure we'll touch on that. And then I think from the consumer side, just again, making the product isn't the easiest to grasp. Obviously in many sports, it's head-to-head betting. So football, obviously we have to draw, but obviously American sports are win or lose. You you've got 10 runners, 12 runners, 20 runners, 30 runners in some races, sometimes quite complex. So I think, you know, making that more simple for buyers over time or for end users over time and customers over time is a big challenge for the industry. So that'd be the two that I'd focus on from an operator point of view and then from a consumer point of view. Stephen, is there anything else that you'd like to add on the back of that? Yeah, probably a different lens, I guess, is the um The competition to racing, know, racing used to be the go-to product for wagering, you know, 20, 30 years ago. Nowadays we have sports wagering, which is becoming, you know, very compelling with younger demographics on like a Cino and combinations of all the Barbie gaming. there are so many more options now for the punter that aren't horse racing. And I think that does pose a very big problem for the industry. How do you attract those younger contemporary punters back to racing. part of our job is actually the innovation side. I racing and sports has always been known for being at the point of the age of innovation. And we still are today. We're still ideating. We're creating products for new demographics, things that the racing purist almost has to hate in order for the younger demographic to love. And that's the hardest part because we are a company built on racing DNA. We're racing purists. When I say to my team, you've got to disrupt your own thinking, you've got to disrupt the way you think about your own industry. You've got to do things that feel unnatural. It's very challenging, but we're doing it and we're doing it successfully. We're creating great products, great innovation. Things that join casino sports into racing are really important. that's right. think you both hit on a really interesting point, which is that we come from Australia and the UK, two markets where horse racing is very closely tied to our national cultures really, it's betting, horse racing, very, very tied into that national culture. But we're trying to operate in some markets where that's not necessarily the case, where players have so many options, online casino is now uh huge, it's available in so many different markets, that horse racing can be, can seem to be left by the wayside in some respects. So Stephen, you touched on that innovation aspect and trying to appeal to a new demographic of punter. How can Sportsbook tailor that content output to make racing more appealing to younger demographics who want that snappier method of betting, who want those online casino type experiences? Yeah, look, it probably starts with less words. mean, you know, our generation, my generation are used to reading content, consuming content, analyzing and understanding it, looking at data. Um, you know, my kids' generation, you know, in that sort of 15 to 18, you know, demographic, they're, you know, they're time poor. They've got lots of things happening. They've got lots of screens, lots of input, you know, and they're taking in lots of, um, lots of content simultaneously. So how do you, how do you engage that? So video, um, audio, uh, visual prompts and gamification, um, are some of the ways that you really just, you you cut through. So we take a lot of data and analytics and we have to distill that into something that's very, very. concise and easy to consume. And that's where the science happens. You know, we, we have some of the best predictive ratings and models on the planet. We have some of the best racing minds on the planet. And what we like to do is furnish our punters with all the information. And that's great for rusted on punters who have been to a racetrack their whole lives. But as you've said, we're dealing with consumers now and customers now and customers now who have never been to a racetrack. You know, horse racing is just something they've seen on the TV. They, know, they may have You know, they may have listened to a horse race live on a radio, a Melbourne Cup perhaps, but they've never actually experienced what horse racing is, but it's a gambling, gaming product. So how do you get that punter and say, this is just another casino game. This is just another roulette spin. It's a horse race. And for Ruston on punters, it's a hard concept to gather, but to get those dollars and get the returns back to industry from a younger, more contemporary demographic, you've really got to provide ways to provide them that really succinct curated content for them to play. It's not even about a game of skill at that point. It's actually just about a game of chance. um You've always got to treat it like another spin on a wheel. And you know, that's sort of the way it's going. So you've got to cater for both audiences. You're rusted on punters and you need demographic who just want to play. They just want something to occupy their time. It's just another spin of the wheel. Really, really interesting perspective. And Jack, we're talking about sort of repackaging horse racing is just another casino game really. And with these new features, m can be some technological hurdles that operators face when trying to implement these solutions for these modern bettors. What are those technological hurdles and uh how can racing and sports help them on this front? I thought you might have gone to the person with a technical degree on this one rather than I'd say no. think what we see with the Platform providers, for example, those that aren't on proprietary tech and we're seeing sort of an influx of international platform providers coming to the UK and apply for licenses. Often their back ends won't be sort of suitable or built to handle the nuances of horse racing. So we have, you know, each way betting. What does that mean in other sports that doesn't exist? For example, rule fours, you know, that doesn't exist in many sports, non-runners, these things. You know, being able to handle sort of the nuances of horse racing can prove a challenge for some of the uh international platform providers that are coming into horse racing established markets. But I think that's where, you know, there's been lots of improvement in the industry, not just from racing and sports, but from from our competitors as well. You know, Some great companies out there, just like Racing and Sports, you've got the Pythias, the Betmakers, the TXODS and things. All of these companies building better solutions, which is great for the industry because it means the standard of the product goes up and the competition remains high. So how do we overcome this as a sector? We develop new tools. So two or three years ago, you wouldn't have been able to deploy an embedded or iFrame solution around horse racing into your Sportsbook stack. Lots of companies have that available now. albeit racing is complex to buy as a package, there has been significant strides forward from suppliers and partners like Racing and Sports to ease that integration and to ease that challenge for international operators. I think, you know, Stephen touched on it at the start of this call where You know, we're competing with other sports like e-sports, for example, there's been a huge rise of that over the past 10 years. It's actually the international platforms that are focused on the UX and UI and how they present some of these emerging verticals. And when they're bringing that product into the UK, it's quite an exciting time and certainly maybe into Australia as well. I'm less familiar with the Australian market, but in the UK, it's quite exciting to see companies like First Sportsbook, Digitane, Altner. all come into the UK market and bring their expertise around maybe football, tennis, e-sports, and that UXUI more gamified and more uh exciting front end looks. But they don't have a racing product and the backend doesn't cope with it. And I think we're all working together to provide solutions there. And Racing and Sports is just one of the great companies in that space. Fantastic. Well, Jack, Stephen, we'll take a short break and then we'll come back and we'll have a bit more of a deep dive into this. how to navigate that competition. Welcome back to iGaming Daily. I'm joined by Stephen Crisp and Jack Kelleher from Racing and Sports. Stephen, before the break, Jack was talking about maybe some of the competition and some of the technical hurdles that operators face when implementing new modern racing solutions for their sports book. I guess one key battleground for that competition is sort of the trading models. What tools and strategies are essential for sports books to manage the risk and protect their sports book effectively? Yeah, it's a great question. One that we get asked all the time. Racing sports is no newcomer to obviously trading and um models, but also the technology behind those. mean, our models are some of the best in the industry. Our predictive models are some of the best based on the fact we are a data company, we are an engineering company, we're a technology company. Racing is our domain. The technologies that we've built though to help our customers in this space are really things like our customer profiling. So, you know, to rapidly be able to profile, you know, the sharps that come in, the groups, the syndicates, the activities across multiple geographic regions that might be of interest. That whole network effect within our ecosystem between all of our managed trading customers and other trading partners. becomes telemetry and inputs into how we actually manage our, you know, our platform and our customers liability and risk. And that's a really important thing that, you know, we need to be well and truly ahead of the curve. need to identify those patterns and movements before they uh get too large and before liabilities obviously accrue. And we do that extremely well. Our trading team led by James King, in the UK. He's got a great pedigree within the trading ecosystem and plus his team. underneath them have all come from deep trading roles within that UK as well. So they're input into our technology stack, gets built out and refined consistently. It's not just a product that we build and is baseline. It's constantly being enhanced and refined and enhanced and refined. And this is a consistent cycle as we learn new things about trading behaviors and activities, because it's always changing too. I if you're a syndicate, what you do today is not what you're to do tomorrow. You have to constantly move with the times and the changes and the way the market moves and evolves. our technology has to evolve and adapt as well, which it absolutely does. So, Jack talked about our Betbridge products, which is obviously integrated with all of our trading, our MTS and our SaaS. There are clients around the world using our SaaS capabilities where they're traders on our tech and we've got our traders on our tech. um And that's a really important distinction is that we have both modalities working in concert on the same effective technical platform, which has all those features uh that enable our customers to manage their liabilities, manage their risk and get ahead of the game and create profitable books. And that's really important. So whether they know something about racing, which is great, they've got their own traders and they want to do bits of it, all of it, or none of it. You know, we cater for all of them. There's a word that you touched on right at the end there, Stephen, which I really want to hone in on profitability. It's really important and anyone looking to integrate this kind of solution is going to be, you know, really Razor Sharp focused on profitability and the upside of racing because we talk about some of the problems that the sector faces, but what is the potential that a modern new solution can add to a sportsbook of GGR and how crucial could this be as sportsbooks face so many challenges that we talk about so regularly on the podcast, like more regulation, more taxes. Jack, what do you think the upside is? Racing gets a bit of a bad rep for being an expensive sport to consume for operators and I'm not saying that that's not true that compared to other sports that it isn't slightly more expensive. But the other way to look at it is that the GGR and the ROI that you can achieve on it is significantly greater than lots of sports. So the head to head sports might run at 7, 8, 9 percent maximum really, and that would include your accumulator betting. taking away some of the newer products that I'm sure we'll touch on that are coming to the marketplace like bet builders and same race multis in horse racing. We can genuinely expect to achieve 15 % GGR for horse racing products. And that's not something that we'll get in casino. Casino probably runs between four and 6%. Obviously we've got the duty that will change in April 2026 that will perhaps have an impact on that depending on how companies choose to sort of treat their customers, I guess, and whether they reduce the payout rates and things to try and compensate those losses. So horse racing becomes really attractive. And I think that one of the things that, you know, racing and sports have done and other companies have obviously noted in, you know, noticed in the sector is an opportunity to, you know, simplify integrations. So make it more accessible for partners all around the world. And then You know, really they can reduce operational risk and operational overheads, create less friction and fully outsource a product that runs to a tier one standard, looks amazing on the UX and UI of their sports books uh and can be a low operational overhead and fixed cost overhead for quite high rewards. you know, international uh horse racing where UK and Australia, where it's in our DNA, you know, might not run at as high yielding numbers as some of the international territories, but as a combined package, you could expect, and it wouldn't be out of question, to get close to 20 % GGR performance. There's 1,500 events going off daily. If you're to build a proper package and work with the rights holders and work with all the key partners, at the weekend you might have over 1,500 events going off, which makes it a significant opportunity. And we're there to help companies, you know, explore that opportunity, guide them, consult them and sort of, yeah, bring that to life. Yeah. We always talk about sort of always on content and it feels like horse racing is the classic. It's the go-to sort of always on content. There's always races going on all around the world, which does provide a huge opportunity. And it seems like racing and sports, you know, deploys its solutions in different ways for different clients based on their specific needs, which obviously offers different options for clients. But I'd like to, as we draw to a close, maybe look at some predictions and look at some hope for 2026 because it feels like most of the time when we talk about horse racing on the show and in our stories on the SBC News Network, it's often with a tinge of not decline, but there's always challenges facing the sector. So, Stephen, Jack, come on, give our listeners some hope. What expectations do you have for 2026? Let's look at the positive side of the industry. Stephen, what do you think? Look, I'm bullish on racing. I mean, obviously I've grown up in a country that really supports racing, really adopts it as part of our way of life. But I do see a resurgence, even going to carnivals such as the Everest, the Spring Carnival here in Australia and the Melbourne Cup Carnival, you're seeing a lot more young people really come to the carnivals and engage. And that's a really positive sign. the way they engage, obviously, as I've said before, is somewhat different to the way that the old rusted on punters engage, but that's actually a really positive thing. It's up to us as a B2B uh provider and an industry provider to actually lean into those and actually find out how we support those new customers. I think globally, Racing is, um it might be slightly on the decline, but the quality of racing is still there. mean, you look at Hong Kong, example, know racing and sports has just invested in several businesses in the Hong Kong market around publications and digital assets. And that's a massive market. And, you know, they're not declining. They're going as strong as ever. The Whirlpool concept is going as strongly as ever. So that's a really exciting, you know, change within, the global landscape. And we're seeing it led to Asia. So it's a really great. place for racing and sports to be established and growing in that Asian region. The Middle East is coming online as we've seen, lots of opportunity there and lots of quality racing, um really well run, world-class facilities, world-class racing, and we're only going to see they get bigger and bigger. So as certain markets start to decline, um other markets will take up that slack. And I think you'll start to see that just a shift of some of the popularity and some of the movement and momentum within racing. It's not going anywhere. You know, people love horse racing. It's an employer. Um, you know, it's it's a great social event as well. There's, a great social fabric to racing. And when you know, you know, and when you're in the industry, it's something that is, you know, it's, it's irreplaceable. Um, I've, not ever experienced any other industry that has a camaraderie has the, you know, the family type feel to it. got all these conferences like us last week and you see people and it's like saying all family members, your second cousin, your third cousin, your you know, brother-in-law and these people are people who you have a beer with, you have a drink with, and you see them two or three times a year, but it is an amazing industry and it really breeds this type of union. So I think, you know, I think I'm really positive about where racing's going, really positive about what we're doing as a company, you know, and, and obviously Jack can speak for himself, but what, know, we're doing in the UK is, you know, it's disruptive in the right way. And, um, you know, I think we're having an overall net positive effect on the industry. Excellent. And Jack, where are your? Where are your predictions and hopes for 2026 in horse racing? think as Stephen touched on the Asia Pacific areas continuing to grow, whether it be Japan, Hong Kong racing, it's slightly different story in the UK. But again, I'm really bullish about it. We've investment in the sport from one of the key rights holders this year in the sort of acquisition or part acquisition of the Invades company and bringing out a new concept in the Friday Night Live. I think that that you know, making it more of an entertainment product is something that the rights holders are really getting behind of behind. And I think that that will be important to the future of the sport. So I think, you know, the really positive strides there, we've seen the Premier Racing concept have a really good impact turnover is up, according to the BHA around those critical and key highlight fixtures of the year. So I think so. Less is more, higher quality. think the rights holders are working towards that. think improving the entertainment of the sport. then, you know, just creating sort of that crossover from where the UK audience and European audience might bet. you know, we've seen the rise of bet builder, for example, as a key product in sports. We saw Skybet launch squads in the last few weeks, which Allows you to group players towards how many shots on target, how many free kicks that group of players will give. I think racing is following suit in terms of making products that people are familiar with across other sports verticals. And that will make it more accessible for them. So they're not having to bet on each way or try and understand these complex betting markets that they're bringing markets in that are that people are familiar with betting on. I think the industry is making great strides. I'm pretty bullish on what the next 12 months will look like in the UK. And I expect to see some positive figures coming out of the BHA this time next year. So yeah, and I think all of the companies and suppliers. The other thing I think in the industry is a lot more competition in the industry from a supplier point of view. And competition breeds higher performance from those companies. And ultimately operators and end users will get a better product. Finally, I think there'll be a bit more bespoke experience for users. So think now the data that's being captured using things Stephen talked about, customer profiling engines, generosity engines, I think we're going to see more bespoke experiences for customers. And I think that that'll keep them more engaged. So I think, really bullish on the, on the sector and on the sport itself. Yeah. Plenty to look forward to in 2026, not least Cheltenham, which is only a good few weeks away now. So we'll really feel the momentum start to build for that soon. But Stephen, Jack, thanks ever so much for taking the time to talk to me today. em And I really enjoyed the conversation and learn a little bit more about what's going on behind the scenes in racing. And thank you to our audience for tuning into today's episode of iGaming Daily and join us tomorrow to keep up to date with all the latest global gambling news. Thank you for listening to today's iGaming Daily podcast, supported by OptiMove. the number one CRM marketing solution for the iGaming market. If you want to find out more about some of the subjects raised today, feel free to explore any of the sites in the SBC News Network or check out the latest edition of the SBC Leaders Magazine. Happy reading.