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SBC Leaders Podcast is a series of interviews with CEOs and decision makers at some of the betting and gaming industry's biggest, best and most innovative companies.
Sue (00:01.929)
Hello, Sue Schneider, and we have a very special guest for our Leaders podcast today. Again, with the Leaders podcast, we look at people that have been in the industry for a while and have really made some amazing contributions to it. So Nigel, it's great to have you on. Talk a little bit, if you don't mind, about what your background was before you ever came into our industry.
Nigel Eccles (00:19.822)
Thank you, I expect to be on.
Nigel Eccles (00:26.094)
Mm-hmm.
Oh, I've been in the industry since 2000. So actually it was my...
So I get graduated about 98. I went to consulting for about two years. And then my first job in the industry was as a product manager for what was Flutter.com, now Flutter Entertainment. that was sort of 2000 to 2002. Yeah. Pretty much my whole career. Yeah. So since there's been...
Sue (00:59.453)
So you've really grown up in the industry. It's pretty much been your whole career so far.
Nigel Eccles (01:06.83)
Obviously there was a little bit of online gambling in the late 90s, but really kind of exploded around 2000. And so yeah, I've been in the industry since then.
Sue (01:14.335)
And so how did you find yourself gravitating into the path toward toward FanDuel?
Nigel Eccles (01:19.906)
Yeah, well, so.
Yeah, so like in my background, my university, studied pure mathematics. I'd always been very interested in probability. That was kind of my route into the industry. I was at flutter.com 2000, 2002 through the merger with Betfair. I left there and helped relaunch BetDAC, which is a betting exchange in Dublin. And then in 2007 started Forerunner to Fandil.
Originally it was a prediction market, which is quite funny because for 10-15 years I've had to explain to people what a prediction market was. I don't have to do that anymore. So we launched it. It was called Hub Dub. We launched it in early 2008. Very popular. But we didn't really have any ways to do payments and we saw that sports was our biggest category. And so 2009 we launched Vanduul and it was very successful from very early on.
Sue (01:58.079)
ahead of your time.
Sue (02:03.039)
Right.
Nigel Eccles (02:22.927)
and grew like a rocket ship for five, six, seven years through to its acquisition and our merger with Flutter's US division.
Sue (02:37.759)
In terms of looking at, again, I started in 95, and I'm in St. Louis, so we had a big fantasy sports company here. it began to morph from season long into daily fantasy sports. Can you talk a little bit about what that progression was like and how you came up with that?
Nigel Eccles (02:46.124)
Mm-hmm.
Nigel Eccles (02:50.029)
Mm-hmm.
Nigel Eccles (02:54.977)
Yes, yeah. Yeah, that was very deliberate on our part. You one of the funny things about Fandale was that the founders weren't fantasy sports players. And so we actually came into it from a very...
kind of like sort of fresh and you could say ignorant point of view. We just sort of said, okay, we find this game really complicated. We find that it takes a long time to play. And so what if we just took the game and we find that people love the research and they love the competition.
And we said, why don't we keep all that, but why don't we make it so that the games only last one day? And why don't we really simplify a lot of it? We'll let you play just on your phone, which at the time you couldn't do. This is like 2009, 2010. And we'll put real cash prizes around it. And that was that combination of those three things just like transformed the industry. So it went from something that was like, it's fun, like 20 odd minutes.
of people play fantasy sports but it didn't really it wasn't a great gaming product it wasn't like yahoo or esp and made lots of money from it and so we turned it from something that was very popular into a very like a very successful business
Sue (04:29.631)
If you look back at that time, do you think the fact that you guys had kind of a fresh look at it was important as opposed to being players that were entrenched in that old style, they used to call it vertisserie league, which I never did really understand why. How important was that?
Nigel Eccles (04:38.037)
Mm-hmm. Yes. absolutely. we're just really, yes. Yeah, yeah. We're just, very much so. Fantasy is hilarious. You know, we would go to these events, like the Fantasy Sports Trade Association, which I'm still a, I'm a big fan of. And we would show our product to a lot of people there and they were like,
That's it. just really, like they didn't, weren't impressed. And they said, let me show you what we're doing. And it would be like...
it would be like mind-blowingly complicated. was like, touchdown is like four points, but if it's this, then it's six points. then, you know, but if you're in this league and any people have built these incredibly complicated systems that, you know, were great, but there weren't mass market. And so what we had built was to a lot of people, they thought, that's way too simple. Like, you who wants to play that simple game? And I think what we managed to do is we captured the essence, which is
People wanted to, they loved the research, they loved the competition, they didn't necessarily want the complexity and that's what we managed to do.
Sue (05:55.549)
That's great. Yes, obviously it worked. Let's talk a little bit about as we move up through the years with UIGEA. I was chairing a trade association called Interactive Gaming Council at the time. we would go into the staff offices in DC. And it was amazing how many people had their fantasy sports calendar or their fantasy sports screens up on their computers. And I also remember, and I think it was the All-Star game that some of the folks had a plane.
Nigel Eccles (05:58.028)
That did, yeah.
Nigel Eccles (06:03.745)
Mm-hmm.
Nigel Eccles (06:07.382)
Mm-hmm.
Nigel Eccles (06:14.114)
Mm-hmm.
Sue (06:25.473)
circling and said something like don't take our fantasy sports or something. It was interesting so as you look back there was an exemption that was successfully put into UIG. So talk a little bit about that and how that worked and and that was that was a big a big play.
Nigel Eccles (06:29.111)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Nigel Eccles (06:35.327)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, so fair.
Yeah, so UIGA or U-I-G-E-A was passed to sort of shut out the poker operators. Now, amusingly, one of the things that happened was a bunch of the senators who were passing it sort of were like, well, we play in these fantasy leagues and we don't want that to be banned. And so they put in the safe harbor for fantasy sports that they wanted to protect fantasy sports. so that
2003, by 2009, whenever we came along, we went and I downloaded the bill. It's very funny when you download the bill, it's like, you know, 400 pages of the Safe Port Act, which is the main bill, which is about American ports. then tacked on the back is Uiga and in it is this definition. And I read it and I'm like, and it defined fantasy sports. It's a game of skill.
you know, where
Nigel Eccles (07:44.334)
play between players or its accumulation of statistical points across multiple sporting events. And, you know, one of the interesting things was I looked at it I said, it doesn't say it has to last all season. It just says it's a competition, you know, between players where it's about accumulation of statistical points across sporting events. And so we said, well, the clause quite clear. It doesn't say it has to last all season. This daily version is just as legal as the season long version.
And that was a really big part of we said, yeah, we can do this. And that's when we started it. Yeah.
Sue (08:20.595)
That was huge for that side of the industry. was just amazing looking back at that. One of the things that, especially now that I'm more in the startup side of things with another venture, I look back at innovation in the industry, and you clearly were an innovator. It seems like it always comes from loopholes. So I mean, if you look historically, mean, how do you look at innovation and the difficulties in a highly regulated
Nigel Eccles (08:30.593)
Mm-hmm.
Nigel Eccles (08:40.706)
Yeah.
Nigel Eccles (08:48.663)
Yeah.
Sue (08:50.539)
industry.
Nigel Eccles (08:51.595)
Yeah, it's a really good thing. I had a discussion with someone this morning about it. And I said, you know, I said the thing is the US, the way the US system works is the US is the sort of barass of law that is sometimes conflicting.
And I would never call something a loophole because, you know, as an entrepreneur, I have to read the law and I have to like talk to experts to say, what does this mean? And I then have to say, where are these, where's the opportunity? Now, in that instance, that wasn't a loophole. was specifically written in there. There's this fantasy sports. Now, up until the point that we came along, maybe no one had said, it doesn't say it has to last all season.
Sue (09:25.087)
Yeah.
Nigel Eccles (09:35.936)
them. That's not the definition. you know, I think the law was written in a way that it was open to there being innovation. There was open to entrepreneurs to come along and say, actually, you know, we can do this within the law. I don't. And so I think the job of an entrepreneur is to go in very closely to read the law and say what is permitted and what's not and then build within it. I think
A mistake any entrepreneur makes is thinking that they can compete with a, you know, like a, like one of things I've never done in my career is try and compete with an established giant toe to toe. Like to sort of say, you know, like even today in prediction markets, I'm not, I wouldn't go out today and try and launch a prediction market in the U S because you know, those companies are not established. They've raised billions of dollars.
of capital. I don't think you're going to have a very good experience. But what I've always done is said, okay, where is there white space? Where is there, when I look at the legislation, is there opportunities for innovation that no one's doing today? And if I'm right, then sure, in three, four, five years time, I will be the company. And this is what happened with Fandil. I will be the winner. When sports betting got legalized in 2018, Fandil was the gorilla, right? You know, not these other...
companies and so that's what I always look for. Where is these opportunities today that I can build a company that in three four years time becomes the dominant player.
Sue (11:13.469)
Yeah, I think that's good guidance for entrepreneurs coming up because it's, you know, we see people that are trying to go head to head with Cauchy Polymarket and, you know, unless you have a lot of money.
Nigel Eccles (11:23.661)
Yeah, think it's a, yeah, like I, it's always been a mystery to me why people have gone that approach. And I understand they're like, oh, these things are hot. And I'm like, you know, it's, that's the wrong thing. You should be thinking about what's gonna be hot in three, four years time. You should be thinking about what is the category that you can make hot, that then you are the calcium polymarket in three to four years time.
Sue (11:47.711)
And in the interim you can use things that support them or that they need to be able to make their product better too.
Nigel Eccles (11:52.771)
Yeah.
there's certainly other like within prediction markets. It's not a homogeneous. Not every operator company in that space is not competing with with them. I'll give you an example. Four, five years ago, I set up a company called Bettex. It's a prediction market, but it's focused on the international market. In fact, it's particularly focused on B2B. And so it operates in the Far East. It operates in Latin America. So it doesn't really compete with Polymarket and and Calchi.
But you know, they've had four years head start and they they're completing it. They're competing with a similar product and a totally separate market.
Sue (12:32.734)
Let's go back to history for a minute and talk a little bit. You lived through some DOJ experiences where they were looking at you guys. Talk about that. Because that was kind of a weird period to watch. But living through it probably was even stranger. So how was that?
Nigel Eccles (12:35.789)
Mm-hmm.
Nigel Eccles (12:42.317)
Yeah. Yeah.
Nigel Eccles (12:51.533)
Yeah, yeah. So late 2015, the DFS industry sort of went into crisis. had what happened very sort of weirdly. There was an employee on DraftKings, entered a tournament on Vanduil and they had won. I think they came second. And it became this accusation of insider trading.
The accusation was laughable, like that person had no access to any special information. Actually, ironically enough, we did this analysis at time because, you know, some Fandu, at the time people did play on competitor sites. Fandu employees never played on Fandu. Draft Kings employees never played on Draft Kings, but they were all, they were young sports fans that loved fantasy sports. So of course they played fantasy sports elsewhere. There was this accusation that they had this insider information.
analysis and we discovered the Trafkings employees, we went through and identified all of them, were actually as bad or worse than every other player. So they had no special insight and that was even including after this win. But this accusation just kind of snowballed and the media sort of fanned it that this was like and so anything they could throw at the companies.
Then it sort of turned into attorney general investigations. It's kind of nuts. Like this is fantasy sports. And then we had DOJ, FBI, know, all these different federal bodies investigating sort of corruption. The problem for them was there was no there there. Like there was no corruption. There was no insider trading. It was all sort of fictional. But what then happened was a lot of the attorney general, so like we're seeing with prediction markets said, you know what? There might be no
Sue (14:39.903)
Mm-hmm.
Nigel Eccles (14:41.803)
corruption but we've decided this is illegal gambling and so what happened over the next two years is we then were in a fight with the Attorney General's most notably in New York with the H.E. Schneiderman to sort of say no this is fantasy sports this is not illegal gambling.
And that was very weird and very scary because you had all of these kind of of pile on from attorney generals who were obviously loads of class action lawsuits which took, know, everybody took a toll on the company trying to fight these and bring the company through.
Sue (15:19.601)
and history repeats itself today. Maybe you could be talking with some people about your experience, I think, to some of them today. If we get up a little closer, you were leaving about the time that PASPA was overturned. And I'll be really honest with you. I, mean, obviously, FanDuel and DraftKings, I knew had amazing databases. I always thought it was kind of a placeholder for sports betting. But I figured they were just kind of both.
Nigel Eccles (15:21.749)
Yeah, absolutely.
Nigel Eccles (15:27.274)
Yeah.
Nigel Eccles (15:32.493)
That's right.
Nigel Eccles (15:43.799)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Sue (15:49.395)
sell off the database or whatever. Who knew they would both be the powerhouses that they are today? So talk about that whole PASPA path toward toward opening that all up.
Nigel Eccles (15:50.335)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I I said it then, I said it before and I'll say it today.
We knew like I knew that Fandirl and Draftkings were going to dominate. I didn't think we were going to be players. I felt we were going to dominate. Jason Robbins at Draftkings felt exactly the same. And the reason is like I have a lot of respect for the casinos like Caesars, MGM, know, for ability to raise billions of dollars and to build a cathedral in the desert, get people to turn up and spend money. They're amazing, right? They are incredible. It's a totally different
business from online sports betting and anyone who's been in both industries will say it's like, you know, running a physical casino is much more like running a really big and complex hotel. Whereas running an online sports book is much more like it's more like video gaming, right? You have to manage, you know, fickle engineers, you know, you have to you have to deliver product. You have to understand online marketing. It's a completely different business.
Sue (16:58.814)
You
Nigel Eccles (17:05.935)
And so we knew, and we knew at Fandil and they knew at DraftKings, was whenever this opens up, we are going to be sitting there with a nationwide...
recognized brand, which is for a product that is very similar to sports betting among young male sports fans. We're going to have millions of users that are in our database that are marketed to and we are going to have, think when PASM cleared, we had like 400 employees and these are engineers, product managers, designers, marketeers, know, everything that you need in order to run one of these companies. And so we had this massive advance
advantage over like Caesars or MGM. Like if we look at some of our competitors, MGM, which is number three or four now, like they had to do a JV with NTN or GVC as it was at the time in order to be a player because they just didn't have that expertise. MGM just did not have that expertise. Caesars acquired I think William Hill, but like even MGM and I talked to Adam Greenblatt at MGM.
and he did an amazing job. Like he was having to get people to fly over from the UK and he couldn't get visas and you know he had to build that from zero. Found it on DraftKings, sitting there 400, 500 employees ready to go and so it was very clear to me that they had just this massive advantage and so it was just no surprise that they should they should do so well. And really they had such an advantage on day one and so
you know the outcome and the outcome actually and you we see this in every time we have a state opening like whenever you know like let's I'm trying to think of some of the later states but like you know if
Nigel Eccles (19:00.683)
some of the, like say Virginia, I Virginia was quite early, but like with that North Carolina, when that state opens up, Fandel and DraftKings have a player base in that state that they can say, sports betting's open. Whereas, know, AMGM fanatics need to go and market and they need to go and try and, you know, acquire users where Fandel and DraftKings are like number one and number two on day one. So it's just such a huge advantage.
Sue (19:26.419)
Well, and you bring me up an interesting point, because I've always been curious the percentage of fantasy sports players that would port over to an actual sports betting. So I don't know if you know what that number is.
Nigel Eccles (19:37.702)
Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very, it's very, very high. I think at the very low end, it's 50 percent, but it actually goes much higher. Like fantasy sports players are typically young male sports fans who are risk seeking. Right. Like what's the what's the sports betting demographic? Young male sports fans who are risk seeking. So the demographic, I think actually the true cross sale is more like 70, 75 percent.
Sue (20:03.751)
I've always been curious about what that number is. You have a new venture now. You want to talk a little bit about that? you got some exciting things going on there.
Nigel Eccles (20:05.653)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Nigel Eccles (20:10.293)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So our new company is called BatHog, which I've been working on for about two years. It's a crypto casino and sports book.
The difference though, we have hundreds of competitors and some are really good, know, Stake or Shuffle. The difference I would say with us is we've always taken a very product focused view of this world. so our team is nearly all engineers and product managers and designers. I'd say Crypto Casino has the area that we think it's weakest is they very much more focused on marketing and there isn't as much differentiation of product. And so what we've said is we are going to invest, we're going to build an amazing product.
One of the biggest areas that we've is, or biggest area we focused on is in LiveDealer. So, and what we built and we decided this last summer was we felt that AI was now at a point where we could actually use it to create a better version of LiveDealer using avatars and AI. It's something we started building last summer. We launched our V1 in October and then...
Two weeks ago, we launched our V2. Our V2 has got a photorealistic avatar who looks like an incredibly pretty human. It has very natural mannerisms, who talks very naturally. And.
She's your Blackjack dealer. So that's what we launched. And then with that, what we also launched is Sentient Studios because what we decided was this is such an amazing technology. It actually makes much more sense for us to license it as a B2B player to other casinos. And that's what we're doing now to basically put AI powered live dealer into like every other casino.
Sue (22:03.323)
Mm-hmm. Well, B2B has a different animal than B2C. So how are you finding that?
Nigel Eccles (22:06.583)
Totally. Yeah, it's been really interesting. We were sort of separating the businesses and so we have a team running B2C and I'm much more focused on B2B now. Like at its core.
still you have to build a really good product. And that's something that we like, I would say 90 % of our engineering effort is on making this product better and better. Humans are really good. We've got, you know, millions of years of evolution ahead of AI. And so it's a really hard thing to do. But AI is advancing so quickly that
We are already, like where we are today is we are finding that users, they really like this product. What we actually found is that our AI product is 10 times more popular than our equivalent live dealer product on BatHog. So people just find it easier to jump into. It's non-judgmental. It's actually, it's quite cool. Something we've built in is the dealer can actually advise you on playing black
Jack. So if you get a 16 against a 10, she'll tell you what the book says. She doesn't know what the next card is, but she will tell you what the book says you should do. So we find it to be a lot more popular, but we're still optimizing it to make it a better and better experience. So that's what we're working on today. And then with B2B, it's really just now talking to the operators, understanding what they want to achieve, what their needs are, and then also talking to the aggregators so we can get into their product.
Sue (23:16.799)
Hmph.
Nigel Eccles (23:46.019)
next.
Sue (23:46.917)
Mm-hmm. And you're getting good support for your efforts there,
Nigel Eccles (23:52.108)
Yeah, it's been incredible. Couple of interesting things. There's certain things that...
We sort of thought early on, like, is it going to be by cost? Like, LiveDealer can be very expensive, and that's definitely a factor, and this comes in, it comes in cheaper. But we have also discovered a couple of other things that are really important. The first one is flexibility. So we can give a casino a branded product, so it's got their branding, LiveDealer, and we can give them one table, or we can give them a thousand tables, and we can scale up or down instantly. So that's really important to them because normally,
if they do a branded table they have to like have fixed for multiple months and then secondly our dealer can speak in 140 different languages and so not only can she speak different languages but she can speak in so not only is it like English, French, German you know the major languages but she can speak in Basque, Catalan, she can speak in dialect so she can speak in Brazilian Portuguese so we can really
really dedicated and what the operators know is with their customers is they really want their dealers to speak their languages and their accents and they want them to look like them. That's all the things that we can do which is very very hard for a live dealer provider to do.
Sue (25:15.687)
Yeah, I could see that. And I can see why you have all the engineers then too. You know, I think the fact that you have always been product focused is really key. Why do you have that philosophy?
Nigel Eccles (25:20.843)
Yeah, it's not trivial.
Nigel Eccles (25:30.03)
Why do we have that philosophy? I think it's kind of what I love doing. Like I love building new product. love building like it building Fandale was like just really so much fun getting feedback, making it better.
I think also it builds better businesses. Like if you have a hundred people selling the same product, then there's no differentiation. And so the only way to win is to have like better marketing or to spend more. And then you're just margins just get crushed and crushed and crushed because you know, you, you have a VIP, but your competitor is willing to give them more loss back, more wreck back, and then you're matching it and your business just gets worse and worse. I don't want to be in that business.
Sue (26:05.395)
Mm-hmm.
Nigel Eccles (26:17.647)
I want to build something that's like long-term sustainable good gross margins The way to do that is to build a unique product that no one else has or no one else can compete with
Sue (26:29.917)
Well, you're another good example of the theory that once you get into iGaming, you really never leave. So you're on another path here. Right? I hear you. If you have a young entrepreneur that comes up to you and is interested in getting into the business, what kind of guidance would you have for them?
Nigel Eccles (26:37.709)
I keep coming back. Yeah.
Nigel Eccles (26:49.229)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah, so I actually worked with new entrepreneurs both in the industry and outside the industry, like on a daily basis. I'm actually on the board of, I'm on about five boards and they all came the same. They were all like, young entrepreneur came to me, got this concept and...
I start working with them and they invite me to join the board and some of them, like if you look at draft here, Mexico and Pataco in Brazil, I've been on those boards like seven or eight years and I've been there since day one, or pretty much day one, like really right at the start of their journey.
Like in terms of what I like, the key one is don't try and compete with BMO, don't try and, you know, I've seen people like I want to launch a prediction market and I kind of went, I've like, what is your unique insight? So I always push them as like, what is your unique insight? You know, for Pataco in Brazil, was no one's done DFS here in Brazil. There's a real opportunity. There's 220 million Brazilians and a lot of them are sports fans.
Nigel Eccles (28:02.303)
There's an opportunity and and for drafty in Mexico, it's like, you know very similar But they also said like in our sportsbook aren't that great. We think there's an opportunity here. So I always sort of try to find what is your unique insight? I'm working with a company at the moment who have an incredible skill game product that is very different from the existing sale games products and they have this unique insight into why skill gaming kind of capped out it didn't really become this huge category
could have been. And I'm like, this is brilliant. This is really exciting. This is a multi-billion dollar business based on that insight. I spend, that's what I spend most of time with. And then I really work with them on getting their pitch right, being able to tell their story, and then really, really then optimizing their product and their marketing around it. But it really starts with what is that one insight that they have that no one else has? And then how do we start telling that story?
Sue (29:01.407)
That's good advice and you're right about skill games. When I had River City Group, we actually for three or four years did a skill game conference and it was bigger back then that you know I don't really I don't know what their insight is as to why it didn't.
Nigel Eccles (29:08.375)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah
Well, can tell you quite simply actually, one of the big problems with skill gaming is, so if we think of, I'm thinking of like Papaya or you know the ones that sort of play these solitaire skill games, the difference between those games and a DFS and a poker is that the skill curve is too sharp. So if I put somebody who's like really good at solitaire against somebody who's like okay, you get destroyed. You're not even close, you don't even have a chance.
Whereas I could put somebody who's a, like somebody who understands poker down with a professional, they have a chance. Over the long run they're going to lose, but they have a chance. Similar with DFS. And what that means is, you know, people don't like losing. If they go in and they went in and played DFS and poker, they might lose, but they'll be like, I nearly got that guy. I actually beat him a couple of times. And so that makes it a very different journey. Whereas with skill games, people come in and they lose horribly.
and they don't play. So what we wanted to do is create this, what they have figured out is a way to have a flatter skill curve that they can play games casually and they have a chance, if you're better you're gonna win more often but you're not gonna dominate and that's the insight.
Sue (30:32.497)
Interesting, interesting. So matching up people.
Nigel Eccles (30:35.949)
Not not skill matching because that's the approach that the industry took that sort of problematic It's more in the design of the games themselves that they've really figured out This is how you design the games and one of the things that they've done is sort of real time and not rely so much on motor skills and more on decision-making Motor skills and that's a lot of the skill games today Those are ones where you get a very sharp skill curve because somebody's played like
like Solitaire, like that very quickly and you see their fingers like move like and you can barely see them. They are so good and that game I don't think can be a multi-billion dollar business but one which is more decision-making where there's a flatter scale curve I actually think there can be. So like a DFS is a flatter scale curve and it's decision-making, it's not motor skills, right? So, and that actually think is what I, in my view,
And poker's another one. It's not motor skills, it's decision making based on incomplete information.
Sue (31:41.299)
That's fascinating. Okay, we need to wrap up, let's, can you give just a quick idea of where you see our industry headed?
Nigel Eccles (31:51.246)
Yeah, look I think it's I think I think there's a couple of things happening in the industry I think there's an interesting one which is our industry is going mainstream in a way and a way we didn't really understand and that gambling mechanics are now going into consumer products I think that's both interesting and I also think there's certain concerns about it like
The interesting thing is people are using it because it works like gambling mechanics does create repeat user behavior. People use products more often. The concern is that if somebody comes on to bet hog they come on a fan deal they have chosen to be a gambler. Whereas if somebody goes on to Robin Hood they have not chosen they said I want to invest my money I want a credit card. These are financial things and pushing gambling products onto them I find very concerning and that's something I think is a is maybe a
concerning part of the industry. More within the gambling industry, I just see lots of really interesting innovation. I think AI is going to have a massive impact. Certainly what we're doing with LiveDealer, I think what we're going to see there is, within three to five years, I think probably 80 % of LiveDealer will be AI part. When I look at Blackjack Tables and Baccarat Roulette,
You know, in three to five years time, know, AI will be photorealistic. It will be the way you will know it's AI is because it's so good. It's so the dealer is so engaging. They're fun to play with. And what we will see is I think existing live dealers will move more towards like game show type products, where it's much more entertainment based. But things that like Blackjack, Baccarat, those basics of dealing cards, of spinning a roulette.
wheel, I think that moves much more to AI.
Sue (33:49.001)
Great. Well, appreciate your perspective on this. OK, we need to wrap up, unfortunately. We've been talking with Nigel Echols about his past with Vanduul and his current and future time with Bedhawg. So thank you very much for coming on.
Nigel Eccles (33:53.921)
Great. No, no problem.
Nigel Eccles (34:05.752)
Thank you.