The owners of STS, Mateusz and Zbigniew Juroszek, invested in the London-based startup Future Anthem – Spider’s Web found out. The tools provided by the British are intended to help online casinos analyse the behaviour of individual players. Participants of gambling games will be followed by the watchful eye of algorithms and data processing specialists.
For several years now, the President of STS, Mr. Mateusz Juroszek, has been investing in companies that transfer the technology achievements to the area of gambling games. Over the past year, he has spent money, among other things, on the purchase of shares in the Danish Better Collective, which he describes as an „affiliate and marketing harvester”. His company STS purchased BetSys, a company that had previously provided STS with the application, platform and sportsbook.
Future Anthem
Now Juroszek has decided to make another important purchase. This time, online casino solutions were in the circle of his interest. A startup with a charming name „Future Anthem” is the work of a group of machine learning and big data experts from London universities.
The creators of Future Anthem created a scalable cloud in cooperation with Microsoft. Then they started to present their offer to the biggest lotteries and online casinos in the world explaining that it is time to change the casino industry which has been ossified for a decade How?
Nowadays, leading companies gather information in their databases about billions of players’ interactions every day. However, collecting such information alone is useless if then the casino cannot process it and create a personalised offer for each player based on it.
„Customer databases are swelling. Few companies today are capable of collecting and researching billions of interactions per day. The entire cloud architecture must be built from the beginning to make the project fully scalable. Nowadays all operators in Europe are looking for such solutions. The rest will remain mentally in the 1990s”, points out Mateusz Juroszek, President of STS, in an interview with Spider’s Web.
This is where the role of the London startup begins.
In the betting cloud
The ability to analyse data brought by Future Anthem can help the largest companies to cope with a mass of knowledge. In case of the smaller ones (that e.g. use external providers of gambling games, and therefore did not know how users react to them), it will propose the integration of information coming from players’ reactions into their system.
Therefore Future Anthem proposes: we will connect to your data warehouse, throw billions of interactions into the Microsoft Azure cloud, apply our algorithm, and process them by an experienced data scientists.
The effects of such a marriage will be measurable. The casino will keep very close tabs literally on every player. For example, it will find out that after his sixth defeat, Mr. Kowalski gives up and resigns from further play. The company can dissuade him from making this decision by offering a bonus for additional bets.
Finally, the startup will also offer its support to the developers of online games themselves. Today, specialised studios produce them in the number of even ten to twenty per week. However, it resembles wandering in a fog. The vast majority of games go unnoticed.
Why? It is the issue of the the British. The startup can aggregate data about the age of players, their nationalities and habits, indicating where the reason for the lack of popularity of the given production lies.
Fighting betting addiction
However, the personalisation of betting is not only related to the game itself. The Future Anthem tools can also be used to help players to bet responsibly. In Great Britain, the home country of bookmakers, operators are already obliged to keep an eye on users. If a player deposits £500 three times within 30 minutes between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., the operator must immediately close his or her account. At least for the next 24 hours.
„Players cannot perceive gambling as a chance to change their lives. In a few years’ time, all the companies in the industry will be introducing solutions that will protect users because 5% of them are prone to addictions. In an ideal world we should identify them and close their accounts”, indicates Juroszek.
In Poland this way of thinking about gambling has just appeared. For example, players can set a limit on their deposits discretionarily. STS also allows the players to „self-exclude” from the platform for several months. The customer service can also contact the user and recommend a temporary rest.
„The law does not oblige us to do so, but we are a responsible bookmaker and this is how we want to be perceived”, says the president of STS.
Testing in Great Britain
The Future Anthem project is a unique undertaking on a global scale. In the first phase, the investors of this startup were the industry tycoons – the founders of i.a. Betgenius and Evolution Gaming.
„You have to hurry up because in a year or two they can be desired by investors. They sign contracts with the biggest lotteries in the world, they have a lot of things to do”, says Juroszek.
The head of STS predicts that the startup should be worth several dozen million euro within 2-3 years. Juroszek plans to take advantage of the opportunities this cooperation opens up for him by using Future Anthem technology in his online casino operating in the UK.
What happens next? The owner of the largest online bookmaker in Poland does not hide the fact that their plans are ambitious. „Our plan is to transfer the experience from London onto the Polish ground”, he announces.
The future of bookmaking
In the near future, the bookmaking industry itself may also experience big changes. Apart from investing in Future Anthem, Mateusz Juroszek is also developing tools aimed at personalising STS users. Soon, betting on sporting events may take the following form.
Let’s assume that we love and regularly bet on the teams participating in UEFA Champions League. STS will remodel the home page so that bets on the football elite will be displayed first just after entering the bookmaker’s address into the search engine.
Then we make a bet on the first two matches. The engine responsible for the recommendations analyses them and shows us other football matches which the players willingly bet on. And if we get involved in the game too much, the bookmaker will block us from depositing funds for a certain period of time in order to protect us from inevitable bankruptcy.
Future lies in the USA
The STS owner also plans the expansion in the USA. However, the overseas market is subject to many restrictions. Not only bookmaking companies need a licence to operate, but even websites writing about bets.
That is why Juroszek is going to approach it differently – he wants to provide technology and help other bookmakers to develop the issues concerning marketing. In his opinion, there is enough room in the homeland of NFL and NBA for everyone.
„In 2025, the USA should be the largest bookmaking and casino market in the world. Returns can be several dozen-fold”, he predicts.
