Kambi Group plc (STO:KAMBI)
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Apr 30, 2026, 12:59 PM CET
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CMD 2019
May 20, 2019
Hello there. Had a nice lunch? Sorry, did you have a nice lunch? Yes. Yes, that's better.
I think food was great, wasn't it? Yes. So this is actually a totally historical moment. It's the very first Capital Markets Day for Cambly. Yes, that's cool.
And Mia, you asked me to say a few words to say welcome and you asked me to make a brief introduction of myself, right?
Yes.
So I thought I'd tell you about my childhood. How's that? Yes. So I'm here to show you some slides on my childhood and hopefully try to make a connection of how is my childhood relevant for this company, because no one really knows that. Anyway, my relationship to sports started when I was very young.
And I clearly remember being not even a teenager living in a suburb of Stockholm in Sweden, walking 5 kilometers with my whatever you call it, ticket lottery on paper. That was the time when we placed the bets on paper. So I have my good friend, Thomas, and I, we spent all Tuesday picking up Manchester City versus Hull or Leeds versus Chelsea or Arsenal versus Manchester United. And I always betted for Manchester United to win, which is true. And there was Wednesday because all the bets had to be in at the latest 3 o'clock on Wednesday in Sweden, because the game was all ready on Saturday.
So there was a I was in a hurry. I walked forever and ever, it felt like, with my short legs, walking there, rain, snow whatsoever, went into the tobacco shop, paced my ticket, and I know what they did in the tobacco shop. They took all those tickets, put them in bags, and this went on all over Sweden, probably other countries as well at the same time. We took all these bags, collected them, put them on lorries, driven on petrol or diesel or whatever, drove this lorries to a central location in Stockholm, which is, by the way, the capital city of Stockholm of Sweden, sorry. And there were some people, they were probably just looking at all these tickets and manually calculating taking care of who was to win.
And then on Saturday was the big game. And then me and Thomas, we were waiting eagerly all Saturday. And we were there was a time, there was like 2 channels on TV, channel 1 and channel 2, obvious. And on channel 1, 16, 4 there was this game, Manchester United versus Chelsea or Arsenal versus Sa. And then we were sitting there hoping to get the full score of 13, all correct.
1, Chris, what's that? Cross. 1 cross for second. So that was kind of my childhood. And of course, when you were a young aspiring guy in Stockholm, I kind of dreamt of being a football professional just like, I don't know, Peter Lorimer, Peter Shelton.
And then I ran out of talent at the age of 12. That's usually the story, I think. So I went for a career in ice hockey. I really wanted to be an NHL star. I ran out of talent at 15.
And then I had to walk in the shoes of my father to become some kind of an engineer. So I've been into tech ever since not 15, but a bit older. Of course, my point is, this is where I and I think a lot of Swedes at least got a strong really muddy fields. And as I remember correctly, it was pretty hard games, slippery snow and everything, but great memories. And here we are today with Cambly, basically in the same industry, totally different way of producing the odds for the beds and placing the odds.
Fast forward, the millennials, anyone here remember what the big crisis during the millennial was? Y2K. Y2K. I woke up every morning kind of fear to death that the world is going to stop, The aircrafts are going to come falling down. The trains will suddenly start running the other direction.
The nuclear plants will just because we're going from 1999 to 2000. Of course, this never happened, which is, I guess, us being here is a proof of that because every morning, software engineers, engineers, good people went up, walked out of bed, walked into office and made a few tweaks, a few changes to algorithms for software or hardware. And the world is still carrying on. However, fast forward, at this point of time, I went to an investor conference because I'm also working with a company called HiQ, which is an IT and tech company. We've been listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange since 'ninety nine, so that's been 20 years.
And as part of that part of my job, I went to New York. And in New York, I went for an investor conference. I met a really young, passionate guy. He had a strong passion for sports, horses, football. And he came to me up walking and said, hey, I have this idea.
Internet is here and sports. I think we could combine this. And that's the first time actually when I met Anders Strem, who was the founder of Unibet. And that's the first time when I kind of connected my childhood for placing bad bets on good football teams in England with tech. So from that on, I've been working with tech and Internet.
So what else went on? Maybe not interested. I think 2,000 was like 5 years before Facebook ever started. The big guys which we read about with fear in the papers were called Clinton and Yeltsin, and now it's Trump and Putin or whoever it is. A trick question down to the right.
Is there anyone here who knows that guy was or is? This is one of my big idols. And again, this one, not this guy. That's David Bowie, of course. In 2000, he was the 1st artist that ever launched his record.
Yes, he did as well. Yes, he was in the financial industry, yes. That's correct. Yes. Now he also launched his first record, so you can download it instead of buying it on the CD.
Anyway, so that was 2,000, my connection to the gaming industry. Fast forward again, what's going on right now? I have another friend. I have a couple of friends, Michael. And Michael, he came back just the other month from Barcelona, where there's a big you look out for what's going on in the tech industry.
And he came back and he's really fired up. He goes like, you know what, Lars? The transistors are getting smaller, okay? And they consume less power. That's really right.
And now it's really happening. It's 5 gs mobility. It's been rolled out all over the world. So he's really fired up. And you know what?
You will be able to build in the transistors in the glasses. And even better so, you can connect the glasses to your shoes. Okay. That's good news. That's what I think.
Okay. And then you connect everything to the Google Maps, and they can direct you by busting in your shoes because we also connect everything to the shoes, and there you go. So he's kind of a tech guy. And I'm medium interested in all of that. The only big takeaway I have is that technology is being developed at an even faster pace than ever.
Transistors are getting smaller. We're building into everything. Connectivity, like 5 gs, mobile connectivity is just increasing. And I think these are kind of the fundamentals for the Canvoo business model, isn't it? And it's also affecting us as people and every organization, every people out there in the world.
So from one perspective, I said, well, Mike, now stop, because I think it's really good news you're coming there with. If you came back from Barcelona and said, well, the transistors aren't getting any smaller, They will not consume less energy. Computer memories are getting smaller are getting bigger and more expensive. Then I would start to worry. But this is the context and like the world we're living in as individuals, as Cambi, and also I think it's important to realize that the clients of Cambi, they live in the same context.
Tech is developed so quickly so no one can really develop their own tech by themselves. They need like outsourced partners, of which can be as well. So it's a very interesting world going on out there. And what about the future? Does it look great?
I have one last slide and try to connect all this. This is distinguished English SIR, scientist Arthur C. Clarke. He was a writer. Has anyone heard of him before?
Arthur C. Clarke, yes. He wrote A Space Odyssey, I think. He was also a futurist. And if you check him out on YouTube, in the early '60s, he'd come and predicted the Internet.
And he predicted a lot of things which have come true. And people ask me, okay, Lars, now you're Chairman there, you work with HiQ, you should know what's going on in the future. And I say, I have no clue. I really don't have. And then coming back to Arthur C.
Clarke, he said, if a prophet or a scientist would predict the future and you thought it sounded perfect, then he's totally wrong. On the other hand, if the same scientist or professor would predict something which would seem totally far off, you can make sure that in 2,030 or at the most 40 years to come, the reality will out pass Fertim and bad English, will out pass the predictions by far. The only thing we can be sure of is that the future will be fantastic. So standing here as introduction to the first ever Capital Markets Day of Kandi, I'm very positive. I'm very sure that the Q2 will be fantastic, not only for the world, for us, but also for Kandi.
Thank you so
much. All right. So I'm clearly much younger than last year. But unfortunately, I would say that my career as a gambler started very much the same as his with StreetEasy in Sweden. I also actually had a book on a boxing game when I was maybe 13 years old.
Boxing was still a big sport. And it was a Swedish boxer called Lilian Eklund. He was boxing an English guy called Frank Bruno in European Championship fight. No one cares about that anymore. But at that point, it was very big thing in Sweden.
So I actually ran a book on the school for that match. And that was probably my first experience as a bookmaker. I kept on, yes, working in the finance industry for a few years after my studies. But in 2000, I started at Juniper. And I think the drive for us has always been just to create the best possible sportsbook.
I think not only me, but a few other guys you'll meet later on. We have been working tirelessly for more than a decade just to create the best possible sports betting experience. And that's probably or that's definitely why Cambrex is today. Working at Unibet, we felt that we had no chance of getting the focus and the resources to create the best possible sports book. And therefore, in 2009, I together with a lot of these people that we'll present later on, and of course, together with Andersstrom as well, created a business plan on how to create a B2B sports betting company to serve Unibut, but also to serve our companies.
So I think we've come a long way on actually doing very close to a perfect sportsbook. It's still much, much more to do. But just looking on this year, we have won a few awards for creating a best watch book, both here in Europe and in U. S. And at the moment, we power 9 out of the 50 companies on the EDR Power 50 list, which are especially here in Europe, meant to be the largest gaming operators in Europe.
But of course, the sports betting industry are globalization now with U. S. Especially. When we started looking at Cambly, one thing that was highly important for us to be able to actually create the best borscht book, everything we did had to be scalable. If we want to fight with especially BEST 365 back in the days to create something that the B2C company could do.
We had to do exactly the same thing for everyone. And we couldn't really have a solution where we had bespoke development for each and every operator. And I think that's a very big part of the mantra to this day. We have added to that, but we also understand that all operators have to be different and be their own brands. And I think when we talk about the product later on today, we will talk quite a lot about what we're doing to be able to differentiate as well.
Yes, some, yes, pointers of where we are today. When we started Kambi, we were less than 80 people from Unibet transferring to Cambi. Now we are more than 700 people. I think a lot has happened. I think another really interesting figure is down there in the process.
We could count the orders in 100 of 1000 back in 2009 when we did the B2B plan. Now we're doing roughly $480,000,000 oil changes on a monthly basis. So with 700 people, you clearly see that most of it is highly automated. We use the people to add some additional value to all the algorithms, but most of it is highly automated nowadays. We have customers in 6 continents.
The 7th continent, I don't think will ever be regulated on Tardis. But all in all, I would say that we have grown a lot. We're not a small company anymore. And I think after my presentation, Cecilia will talk more about that, how we are transforming from a small company to a large company. Little bit more about the industry we are in.
You can hear a lot about, spectator numbers are falling in sports. Yes, sure. But I don't think sports has been more popular ever than it is today. However, people are changing the way we are consuming sports. I think also broadcasters have problems because more and more of all the sports in the world are consumed on different types of streams.
And you see big American sports like NFL, they are working with Twitter, for instance, to broadcast their matches. So I think you will see more and more change of how people are consuming sports and therefore being even more adaptable to sports betting. But don't for one second worry about that sports is not still massive interest across the globe. Yes. I want to show you this.
It's actually roughly 3 years old now. This is a penalty in England, Iceland, in euros 3 years ago. I just want to show this because I think this is typically what we always try to do, trying to find ways of making sports betting as instant as possible. We never closed offering for this penalty. With algorithms, it took us less than a second to be up and running with new prices.
And as you will see, as soon as the goal is scored here, prices are changing and you can bet again. This was clearly not possible few years ago. And I mean, we have gone quite far from what Lars was showing. You had to post your bets 4 or 5 days in advance to actually being able to bet on something so instant as a penalty in football. So now I will hand over to Cecilia, But very much of the next bit will be about how we are transforming what we're doing at the moment to fit into a much larger organization.
Thank you.
Thank you, Christian. Yes, so we are on a very exciting journey. And I actually joined Cambi as of the 1st January this year after having, what, 25 plus years of career within Ericsson, mostly within sales, managing sales accounts of €1,000,000,000 around an organizational units of up to 1,000 employees. And I also have the privilege of being staged or based in very different locations around the world. But yes, now I've decided to join this fantastic company with all the opportunities that we have in front of us.
And it's actually not completely new to me, Cambly. I've been Director of the Board for the last 2 years. But now I've taken the opportunity to actually join formally join the company and take on an operational role. And one of the and in a very exciting time also since we are projecting on this growth journey. And one of the most valuable things I learned during my years in Ericsson was the importance of actually having a structure in place for the company together with different processes and tools.
Because if you're going to encounter growing your company and scaling the business, no matter how boring all these things sounds, but it's actually our essence, at least if we want to run a company in a profitable way. So what I'm here to contribute with, apart from my long experience within sales, is also to make use of my experience of how to structure a company in order to prepare ourselves for having higher volume of business and to grow the company. And I should have switched that before. So and what I'm why am I saying this? Well, actually, research also shows that 85% of the challenges and the barriers that companies find when wanting to scale their business are related to internal factors, such as do I have the talent that I need in order to grow?
Do I have the systems in place in order to grow? And so forth. So do I have the processes to manage higher volume of business in an efficient way? So let's have a look at the journey that Cambly has done so far. In my eyes, very, very impressive.
And if we look at the different dimensions here, we see that in most dimensions for the last 9 years, we've been growing with a factor of at least 10 when it comes to number of employees, number of live events, number of end users and so forth. But this, my friends, we believe is only the beginning. We have a huge hope and we see a huge potential in the sports betting market, which we are set to grab and leverage on. So it's really, really important that we also prepare this company in order to be able to grab that. So what do we need to do in order to secure that we do not end up in these structural growing pains that I was showing that a lot of companies do, that 85% is related to internal factors.
Well, I first of all would like to take it out from the stakeholders I mentioned. So these are what we see as our main stakeholders when we're running this company. End users, customers, shareholders and also of course, the employees. And I know I have a crowd of potential shareholders or maybe current shareholders, but let me start from the end users and the customers' perspective. Not sure for me since I'm coming from sales, but in my book, if we do not have people or end users who wants to consume our offer offering, then we don't have the fundamentals for having a business at all.
So from the end user's perspective, we believe that we are in the entertainment business. We help our customers to provide a service to our end users or not a service, but an experience to our users. And if the end users do not find that experience compelling, they will easily move to another sports book and put their bets there. And that of course we want to avoid. So in order to do that, it's extremely important for us that we have a structured way of trying to pick up the trends in the market to understand what the end users are looking for, what they value and translate that into our development department and in an efficient manner develop more functionality and features.
Direct customers. But for our customers, it's extremely important that we can deliver a reliable and smooth service that they can rely on is up and running all the time. A very smooth operational machinery in essence. But as we grow as a company adding on more customers, it's also important that we fast can integrate our new customers onto our platform. We have good processes for that now.
But as we know, what worked before or works now not necessarily works when we're going forward. So we continuously have to further evolve those according to how we develop and how the market develops. Moving on to our shareholders. On top of what I've talked before, which is naturally also important for our shareholders, is to have a return on their investments. And one of the absolutely most important tasks for us as a management team is to have a very stringent and sophisticated approach to our capital and resource allocation, with the ambition of securing a high return on investments for our shareholders.
And I will show you a little bit later, but in order to do that, it's really important that we have a solid strategy and business planning process to really maximize our utilization of our resource and capital to deliver high shareholder value. And finally, employees. Employees, I mean, we are a software company. We are a competence company. So our biggest and most important assets are our employees.
And as we're growing, it becomes more and more important, especially for us being in the high-tech software industry to be able to attract and retain the talents that we need in order to be able to grow and bring this company forward. And there, culture is also a very, very important component in order to secure that we are able to attract talent and retain them and also get the maximum out of their potential. So my presentation here today is a little bit giving you the comfort that what you're going to hear a lot about our product and what we're planning there and how we're addressing our customers. But to give you the confidence that we also recognize the importance of looking internally within the company to be prepared for the projected growth that we see, so that we don't end up in all the structural growing pains that so many companies do and that hinder them to actually profit makes profit of the opportunities that we see out there. So we need to focus, put a little bit of focus or secure that we are up on the level necessary when it comes to structure, processes and tools, our talent as well as our culture.
And I'm now going to show you a little bit what we have done so far in order to prepare ourselves for what the future has to bring for us and also what we're currently working on. When it comes to structure processes and tools, so once again, it's not the most exciting subject maybe, but it's damn necessary. So back to the resource and capital allocation, which I think actually is the absolutely most fundamental or most important task for assets and management. We do have and we have further evolved it during the last year, a very established strategy process where we set our long term strategy on a 3 years horizon. We break that down to company performance target on a yearly basis, which in turns gets broken down into quarterly key objectives.
And that gets actually broken down to departmental and team level within the company. And in that way, we're really having the connection between what we want to achieve as a company and what is expected from each and every one of the employees. It's a very, very solid and thought through process. And we as a management, we monitor this on a monthly basis, how the progress is and where we are. But on top of that, of course, we're also evaluating and reevaluating our overall strategy on regular basis, taking into account recent event, market trends or whatever and ask ourselves, is our long term strategy still valid?
Or do we need to make some smaller adjustments to it? When it comes to the, I usually see a company's processes as the major operational processes as develop, sell and deliver. And if you look at those 3, in the development, we have since a long time, a very we have our development team divided into value streams in conjunction, I mean, who's working in an agile way where we have cross functional self organizing teams. And every 2nd month, these teams get together, take their requirements, discuss the solutions and come up with how that is going to be solved. And at that time so the alignment and the coordination is done there on a bimonthly basis.
And at that time, we're also every time evaluating the development process. What can we do in order to improve it? Because like I said before, what used to work might not work. And we're growing our development department hugely, as you will see on the next slide. And when it comes to sales, we do have an established sales process, which allows us to make very conscious decisions regarding which customers to address, what are the acceptable terms and conditions, but also to identify possible risks and put mitigation plans to that.
And Mike comes through, I don't know how much you know, but we are actually quite when it comes to which customers we want to work with or which customers we want. If we really would have liked, we could have probably signed a lot more contracts, but we want to stick through to the long term strategy we have. And once again, getting back to the actual resource and capital allocation. How do we make the most use or get the most out of the capital and resources that we have? In the development, here we're actually putting some efforts now into our delivery process in terms of last year, you all know we signed quite a lot of new contracts and especially in some contracts in the U.
S. They tend to be a little bit more complex since we have a huge part of retail included in it. So we're now taking in order to make this a repetitive self learning sort of process where we can make use of best practices and so forth, we're establishing a fully dedicated delivery team with highly skilled project managers in order to do this in an even more efficient way. And finally, you know that a company, they both produce and rely on a lot of information. And it could be employee records, it could be financial records, it could be regulatory data or whatever.
And in order to really do that in an efficient way, it's necessary also to make sure that we have an efficient way of handling that data to minimize the inefficiencies in the company. And usually those investments, they pay off immediately because we lose up so much of the inefficiencies. So what we've done lately is we have a lot of good systems in place, but we have upgraded them in both in terms of HR system, in terms of the learning. We have invested in the learning platform. You will hear a little bit more about that.
And also in the reporting and budgeting systems. And from a development, since you will see on next slide that we have increased our development capabilities quite a lot. We're also investing in more capacity in IT testing in order to match that, so that we can increase our productivity overall. Right. From a talent point of view, yes, I was mentioning that.
I mean, we are in the software company, software industry. We want to be in the forefront of technology. That usually those talents are a scarce resource and they are also very highly sought for. But I have to say that I think we've done a really, really good work in attracting the talents and being able to hire. As you can see, we increased our development teams from, it doesn't say there, but from 17 to 34 teams last year in the last 12 months.
And the reason why, I believe, a big reason to why we managed to do that despite that we're actually having a large part of our development in Stockholm, which is a really, really difficult area to recruit talent in, is because of the culture and the reputation Cambly has. We have a really, really good reputation in the market, in the resource market. And the culture that we represent is highly appreciated among our employees, which you can see here. We did an employee survey by the end of the year, and 80 7% of our employees say that they would highly recommend Cambi as a great way, a great place to work. That naturally helps us to attract new talents.
We're actually using this when we're recruiting in terms of lowering our recruitment costs and using a lot of internal referrals to find new competence out in the market. And we also see that in our attrition numbers that it's around 10%, 11%, which is rather a healthy number than anything worrying. It's actually a quite low attrition level. But it's one thing that try to attract new employees and get them into the company. But bringing so many new employees into the company can also jeopardize our productivity, because a lot of the existing employees finds themselves in training the new employees all the time.
So in order to encounter for that, we have invested in in house investment in a very sophisticated on boarding system together with this new learning and development platform, which very quickly provides the newcomers with purposely built training programs in order to quickly get up to speed. But it also provides further capability training for our existing employees. Also, we have over 200 or 300 courses on this platform, which we can purposely target to different employees. And that naturally goes for leadership also. I mean, when we're growing in this pace, people who didn't have any direct reports been lifted up to have 3, 4, 5 people reporting to them.
And all of a sudden, they also are managing teams of the size of 15 people. And we need to coach them because being a leader in a company is a profession in itself, and you need support. So we have encountered for that when putting in place this new learning and development platform. And finally, I just want to share with you, we're really, really proud. We have very good diversity in Cambly as a company.
Not only do we have people from 35 different nationalities, but we have 30 different languages spoken within the company. So we can I think we can truly say that we are a really global company? And that is also one of the things that I think contribute to the very, very good and appreciated culture we have, which leads me into the culture. So what is culture really? Well, culture is the sort of external and internal identity of the company.
It is living on an everyday basis by all employees. And it has a huge impact on how we manage to attract talent, how we manage to retain them, but also directly linked to the performance of the employees. We take a lot of proud in our reputation and in our culture. We hear it from other people when they are joining that they really appreciate our culture or even before joining because they've heard the rumor on this city or on the town that Cambly has a great culture and work with. But as we grow that naturally, I mean, it's very easily that that culture develops to something different or that it falls apart.
So that is something that we definitely are going to put some effort on to make sure that despite the high growth that we're in and despite that we're establishing offices in other different parts of the world and growing with X percent per year, need to put focus that we maintain and further evolve the culture in the way that we want it to be as Cambly culture. Right. And now I have a perfect bridge over to Max, our Chief Commercial Officer, who's going to tell you about how we are intending to conquer the sports betting market. And well, but yet before that, let me show yet one more of the feedback that we got from the engagement survey with our employees. 88% of our employees believe that Cambly is in a position to really succeed for the next coming 3 years.
So there, we can talk about a winning culture in this company. Thank you.
All right. How is everyone feeling? Pumped up a little bit? Hopefully, I can talk you through a little bit of what we're doing in sales and PSD, which is our partner success department. A little bit about myself, I'm the Chief Commercial Officer at ASEMAX Meltzer.
I've been in the this entertainment industry for the last 5 years. Before that, I spent 6 years as a football and cricket agent, so this is a perfect lineup for this industry, right? So here I am now. I'm very lucky and blessed to be in this position here at this organization, think within all the sales organization throughout the Partner Success department, we're very lucky to be part of a company like Canby, and we know it's recognized for its brand globally. And I just want to talk you through a little bit about what we're doing, basically.
So thanks for your time. So basically, there's 3 key elements to what I want to just discuss with you all today. 1 is about how we're set up to grow our customers. Another is a little about what kind of customers we attract and where we go about finding that new business and how we secure them. Before I talk through the slides that represent the final two aspects there, I just want to talk you through a little bit about how we grow customers because I think that's just as important as to why we align to targeting a certain sector of business.
We have implemented here what we call the partner success methodology. It's very much based on other methodologies of customer success that you may have heard of, that other companies use, Adobe, etcetera, around the world, are utilizing it. It's just an evolution of account management, basically. But what it is, is a focus on what are the core objectives that actually we want to achieve as a business, what do others want to achieve from their perspective, and try and align our core objectives and also look to focus on basically how we can make sure they get the revenues in that they are looking for. That means on a day to day basis that our partner managers are aligning with the likes of business intelligence, competitive intelligence, our product development roadmap and trying to ensure that, okay, is there a particular network data that we recognize in certain markets the Canby product works very well?
Or there are certain elements of our product that we should be that particular partner of ours should actually be utilizing a lot more of. So we're not just a technology supplier here. We are an actual indeed partner to our operators, and that's a fundamental element of what makes Canby stand out as a from a service perspective in comparison to others in the marketplace. And that's probably why you're seeing many of our partners actually grow a lot faster than others may otherwise think. So that's just to give you a bit of background, but I'll talk you through here and I'll talk you through some of the sales methodology that we use later as well.
So look, here's something that's really interesting. You may have heard about BetPlay in Colombia, if you haven't. They're an operator partner of ours that launched nearly just over 12 months ago and from a position of 0 have ended up as a key market leader in that country. And I think that goes to show you the strength of our product and our scalability and ability to get to market. Now don't underestimate this.
I think how many times people think when you get a technology organization like ours, you go, okay, you haven't been in Colombia. What do you know about that region? What do you know about the culture? What do you know about the country? What do you have with different sports?
Well, it's quite impressive that an organization like us can just enter into a new market with the right partner to achieve that kind of leverage in that kind of position. And I'd like that to resonate quite a lot with you guys as we go through what else we've achieved. So look, I'll also show you 888. You'll be hearing a lot about them recently in the news, of course, But you'll recognize here the kind of achievement that we've had in terms of their financial transformation as from a sports betting perspective. They have and let me just highlight as well, when they actually changed the Canby, there wasn't any huge investment in marketing from them.
There wasn't a massive change of employers in the markets they went into that point. That was a pure technology change. So I'd like to emphasize just at that particular instance with 888, that technology change very much in line to driving their revenues by almost double. So that's the kind of power again of our product. And anyone that's paying attention to the U.
S, which I hope you all are from a sports betting perspective, will see that we have got 80% market share in Pennsylvania right now with the likes of Parks and Rush Street, who owns River Casinos and also with Sugarhouse. But look, you could also say that we're only a handful of us are in that market at the moment. But I would like to emphasize that there were others that launched before us in that market, have just as suitably good locations in those in Pennsylvania, but yet we've been able to obtain it because of the quality of our product with alongside absolutely fantastic partners in that market. So you can see that gives us a bit of a background to why we're in such a strong position from a selling perspective. You've got a track record like we have to go in and challenge.
But what do we want from a partner? I think it's Cecilia quite correctly said often, we will actually turn down people. In fact, it's a very inverse sales team sometimes when they actually are getting very annoyed at me about us turning down people. But they understand why they're doing it. They understand that we're a product led organization.
They know that if we choose the right partners, they will become market leaders. We will generate larger revenues partnering with the right people than not. And that means to be a successful sales team, you have to be even more well trained and well versed at being able to challenge CEOs, board members of large organizations as to why they should choose Canby as a partner. So that what do they need or what do we want from a Canby partner and who are the sort of people that should be selecting us to work with? Number 1 is we are very focused on market leaders.
We very much believe that we believe that if you are ambitious enough, you have the expertise yourself, that you actually will be able to utilize Cambly's technology better than someone else perhaps being a smaller player in a larger market. Someone in a smaller player in a larger market may be just trying to utilize us as a vertical and to cross sell into different verticals rather than focusing on how do they drive revenue for the whole organization and on choose. A lot of our competitors will do deals that we perhaps wouldn't otherwise do. Choose. A lot of our competitors will do deals that we perhaps wouldn't otherwise do.
And that just creates a technology debt and backlog that we don't want to have at Cambie. You'll hear a lot later about our product development focus. You'll hear about how we try and remain scalable throughout all of what we say. And that's where you've got to be really sharp in who you work with. We only work in regulated markets.
We only want to work in a situation where we don't want to be in a situation where we're working with people who are in black markets. And actually, that approach, just to make this very clear, that fundamental approach is the reason why we were able to break into the U. S. So quickly. Regulators trusted us.
They still trust us throughout we go in the U. S, and there's a huge power and respect for Canby on who we stand for. And that's the sort of focus that Christian and the other cofounders of Canby had from right at the beginning. And that long term perspective is the reason we will continue to be a thriving business going forward. And that's something that resonates within our sales team.
But it has to be scalable. We don't want extensive product requirements. You've got to remember, this is a solution that's already been built to allow them to be empowered to do what they want. Just because we're saying something scalable and we don't want to build lots of stuff on top, doesn't mean that they can't. We have some of the best API functionality there is in this industry.
So a lot of people that come to work with us recognize, hey, we can still build out a team. We can still build out a front end team that can totally build something themselves. We can build out whole BI functions that will be able to derive what's best for our customers and push that through to them. So they're very for us, we just want to have people that are capable of utilizing that and getting the best because then we can help them grow, like I said earlier. So just to give you a bit on the sales led approach, you can imagine we have one solution, we're not a modularized solution, We aren't trying to find just a quick route into a business, so we can try and upsell it later.
When we go in for an opportunity, we need to be able to prove to someone that they could outsource their entire sports book from the trading and risk management and customer service perspective to us and then build on top of that. So that means our sales teams have to be experts. And I think in the last couple of years, if you've gone out and tried to hear and speak to people about, okay, what's Canby sales team like? Or have you even met any of them? I hope that some of you might even get a chance to have a beer with them soon.
But naturally, they're always trying to challenge, and this is what we've got. So you may have been aware of Challenger Sales methodology. If you haven't, take a read of it. It's very it works here. It's not going to work at every business, but it works here.
And the reason why is because we have that one solution. And what it includes in it is about challenging mindsets, it's about educating. And what we focus on is that second point there. Don't turn up for a meeting with the CEO or a Chairman or Board member or anyone if you haven't got something insightful for them to take away from it. They might not buy from Canby then.
They might not buy in the next 3 years. But if they come to see Canby, they're coming to get some information and insight because they know Canby really understands what they're doing. And that's the difference. That opens doors. That's what makes us stand out.
We're not there to just try and sell from straight from the beginning. They will understand through our insights, do you know what can be, know something that we don't. So even if they've got full trading solutions themselves internally go, hey, I really understand that Canby could help us here. Maybe we should consider things. Maybe we should take more meetings.
Maybe we should meet the CEO of Canby. Let's have more conversation. And that's what we try and do, challenge, educate and build some constructive tension. A lot of companies, it's okay to just tell people how things could be done. And I want feedback from them as well.
We want to hear about what their threats and the opportunities that they're seeing in the market. So we also have technical experts. I think a fundamental part of what we've seen in the last couple of years is now we've got solution architects that sit in the sales team. Obviously, they provide credibility rather than the sales guys who who go in and maybe try and develop their relationships and try and break through the sales process. These guys are capturing our requirements that keeps us more scalable and make sure that actually we are in a position where, hey, we can communicate our technological expertise.
If you don't, you might be in a position where we end up having to feel that we have to build something where we don't. But actually, our technology is already flexible enough for them to succeed. Obviously, we've been dealing with a lot of RFPs in the past, particularly in the round of in the U. S. And we've obviously built up a team to be able to keep up to speed with that as well.
So here's just again, earlier, I was talking about the sort of our track record, why it's so impressive about how we can go up and we can talk about BetPlan, we can talk about 888, we can talk about Rush Street. There's lots of these. We could have gone on. I don't want to bore you now, but if you do want to talk to me and get really bored, I'll be in the pub later, and we can talk about this stuff over a beer, right? But there is so much experience of this that we can define and we can show people.
Now to launch on the 1st January with 6 customers online, I think we took our first bet for ATG just a couple of seconds after midnight, And to launch 2,000 retail shops is an incredible feat of scalability and ability defined by people to work throughout that Christmas period to make that a success. You've got to think at the same time we've been doing that, we've been launching retail locations all across the U. S. More so than anyone else. We have had, as I say, 80% market share, B2B 1st to take the post faster bet.
I can't tell you how what it means to us when we can walk in at G2E last year, when everyone came around to see Canby and everyone comes to see us and go, hey, they trusted us. The DGE in New Jersey, because of our long term focus, our scalability, our focus integrity, trusted us. This company originated in Sweden, offices in Malta, to select us to take the first bet. They didn't think, oh, should we let someone else who's been operating in Nevada first to come in and actually take the bet. They thought we would be the best place to do that.
And that's a real string to our bow. And you can trust that this would be the sort of approach that other regulators across the U. S. Will take as well. And that's something to really which resonates a lot with our current operators, our current prospects, and it will resonate, as was alluded to in Cristiano Cecilia's earlier presentations, that it will U.
S. Will strongly push other markets around the world to open up. And if they look at things and go, hey, Camry was first there, they may also be thinking about, hey, why isn't Camry a really important player for our market when it comes? And this comes on to markets like Latin America. They're absolutely following and understanding what's happening in the U.
S. And this is just a certain region at the moment. These are huge opportunities for us right now, and they should be for anyone else. But there's going to be other markets to open up soon. So this hopefully will be a very interesting market for us and for others.
I just wanted to leave on this one slide and talk it through a little bit, just give you a lot of text to really get you going. But in essence, these are 2 very well known individuals in the U. S. Industry. DraftKings naturally incredible brand in the U.
S. And a superb partner for us. They both see us as incredibly important partners. We've enabled them to get to market quickly. We've enabled them, as Jason says, to be able to build their own front end capabilities themselves.
And What you've got here is the combination of scalability, the probity, the flexible solution, and all of these elements are very much at the forefront of how we sell and how we develop a good relationship and how we keep scalable. And I think if people like this in the industry are recognizing what we're capable of, and you see with our 20 plus operators across the to continue to grow really successfully from a commercial perspective. We had a greatest year last year. Who knows what the future holds for us going forward? But you can see we're in a fantastic spot.
So that's me, and I appreciate your time. I will now pass you on to exactly all the information you need around property and integrity. But thank you all for your time anyway. Thanks very much.
Afternoon all. My name is Oliver Lam. I'm the Head Sports Book Controller here at Canby. Unlike Chris, Dean and Lars, I can't remember when I placed my first bet or ran my first book. But my grandfather was a bookmaker at Newcastle Racecourse in the post war years.
And my father also worked for him as well. So I can say I'm a 3rd generation bookmaker. Maybe the key here is I'm a 3rd generation regulated bookmaker as well. So I'm here to talk around corporate property and integrity and how we apply that to our operations. Now one thing Christian mentioned was that we are founded in a way as a response to his prediction around an increasingly complex world that was facing operators, not just in terms of product and the technical systems that needs to be developed, but also around regulation.
We could see that the world was going to change from the slightly gray map that we see there, where there were a handful of locally regulated markets, such as the U. K, Italy or Nevada. That was going to expand to see a large chunk of the map be locally regulated by individual states and nations. And I guess the head scratcher for operators was how are we going to take our locally dominant position from the U. K.
Or Italy and apply that to Denmark and to Latin America and to the U. S. And change our product and get licenses and scale our organization. And indeed, Cambie, when we first started off our early operations, we had just the 2 licenses in Alderney and Malta, which was all we needed or could take back then as a company. But if you fast forward 10 years or so now to 2019, and we're slap bang in the middle of that kind of regulatory complexity that was envisioned all those years ago.
Right now, we as a company hold licenses in 9 jurisdictions and counting, particularly with the U. S, which we need to support our operations. Whenever we can take a local license as a B2B, we will take 1. Beyond that, we have a further 13 accreditations in different regulated markets where we'll support our operators by having our systems audited. And the regulators looking at how we are set up so that they trust us.
And we also have further certifications from in SACI recognized organizations, such as we have we hold the ISO 27,001 certificates
for our
technical operations. And these are the kind of accreditations, licenses, certifications that we need to be able to scale at pace also to mainly allow our operators to scale at pace and to go into different jurisdictions, different countries and allow them to succeed. Also, it allows us to show to operators in new jurisdictions, who currently aren't with Cambi, that we're the right choice for them. Now we've taken our learnings and experiences from around the world and applied them to the U. S.
We've taken a proactive approach over there. I think like a lot of overnight success stories, our progress in the U. S. Has been 10 years in the making. And we've been there looking at our product early on, even before we launched over there, making sure we're ready in terms of that, making sure that our organization was 20 fourseven and global so that we could supply the U.
S. Market correctly. And we also took a proactive approach in terms of how we looked at regulation. Max was mentioning how we aim to be build partnerships regulators. And it was on the 4th December 2017 when the U.
S. Supreme Court heard the old arguments against PASPA. I'm sure you're all tuned in and realized that it was probably looking good for a potential repeal. That was December. And in the 1st week of January, me and some colleagues, we were on the plane, we went over to New Jersey, visited the DG, presented CAMBI and who we are.
So even full 6 months before we even before the online light environment launched and 8 months before we launched our product with DraftKings, we were in there talking to the regulator, building relationships, not just to get a license, but to say, to build a long term lasting partnership So they could learn from us and also we could learn from them. We're open. We're honest. We know it's a new territory for us, and we were looking to learn as much as we possibly could. One thing on our side was that we have got the transparent corporate structure, the secure systems and the market leading products that we needed to not just obtain licenses, which is stage 1, but also to make a success in the market when launching our operators.
One part of my role is because I work mainly on the trading side of things, but I do wear my lobbyists hat and go and speak to regulators. And I've been over there a few times in the past 12 months and continue to travel, talking to regulators, legislators on panels, in networking and events. We've spoken at the North American Gaming Regulators Association, NAGRA. You can write that down in your notes to shorten it. And also the National Council of Legislators from Gaming States, Nickel G's, again, much easier to write down, to build the right partners.
So even before we get a license, even in fact before a state legislates or regulates sports betting, we can be there presenting, sharing our experiences from around the world about what effective regulation is, what a good product is, telling the legislators and regulators our viewpoint of ultimately what they want to do is they want to succeed. They want to generate tax dollars in their state, and we can tell them what we think is the best way for them to do that. Obviously, we believe that means allowing Canby into the states. But we can share all the experience we've taken from around the world. And I can show you now a map of which I'm sure you've all seen variations of this many times in over the past few months.
But we'll be looking to apply that same proactive strategy over the coming years as regulation rolls out Westwood. Let's say, we believe that our current approach is working for us in terms of we're successfully getting licenses. We've got 4 right now. We're in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Mississippi. We have the licenses.
We've applied for a license in New York, hopefully ready to go. We've never been rejected for a license in the past, and we believe that we'll carry on obtaining these licenses. And I say we aim to roll out our strategy we've been taking to regulation across the country and believe that we've got the transparent culture,
the product and
the systems to scale across that whole market. Another area I want to talk around in terms of corporate probity transparency is our work on sports integrity. Cecilia mentioned how there's 700 of us here at Canby around the world. One thing that maybe wasn't mentioned was that if you want to be one of those 700, you've got to be a sports fan. We're in sports betting after all.
We're all passionate about sports. I myself, big football fan. My claim to fame is I'm probably the only person in the world who's held season tickets at Real Madrid and Tramirovs. Anyone challenged me on that, but I don't think there's anyone else who's done that, the double. And we take our approach to integrity in a similar way to regulation.
We're too transparent around it. We're going to cooperate with the various stakeholders in the space. And some examples of the kind of partnerships that we've worked on in Nourished over the past few years are here on the screen. So we'll work with regulators, of course, as mentioned. Obviously, in the U.
S, one of the buzzwords has been integrity. In the past few months, it looks like we've all dodged the integrity fees, but we'll see about that. But we'll be working with regulators in the U. S. As much as possible.
They ask for every integrity alert to be passed on to them, and we'll be doing that. But already in Europe for many years, we've been working with the U. K. Jet Gambling Commission, for example. We're in almost daily contact with their sports betting intelligence units, sharing information, also receiving information from them and corroborating it.
Likewise, in Spain, we've been advising the DJOJ over there around their integrity setup, which is going to be launching pretty soon. Where possible, we have MOUs in place as well with sporting federations, a couple of the big ones there, FIFA and the IOC. So again, if we do see something suspicious on events, which are controlled by them and organized by them, then we'll be able to pass on that information directly to sports governing bodies. We also take a proactive approach again there. So not just the big organizations like FIFA, we'll also look at assisting the more nascent sports, such as esports.
We work with the Esports Integrity Coalition, looking to keep those kind of new and upcoming sports clean of integrity issues as well. We work with international organizations, example, Airs Council of Europe, also with the European Union, for example. We've taken trips to Brussels and Strasbourg to share best practice of what we've learned over the years in integrity to influence not just the regulated, but also in a way legislation, how sports are governed themselves and how we can help out. So the betting industry is not an outsider in the integrity discussion. We got a lot to share and a lot to share.
And finally, we're not just interested in the integrity of the sports themselves. We're also looking at taking active interest in the integrity of data. A large part of our sports betting platform, particularly in play, runs on data provided by official suppliers such as IMG Perform. And we'll be in constant contact with them so that we can aim together to boost the quality of data which is entering our system. And integrity is it's as well as kind of a more strategic mission of ours, as seen previously.
It's part of our day to day operations. So we'll be profiling every event and every bet that we see in our systems, not just from a profitability angle, but from an integrity angle. And we believe that a sustainable organization should be doing that. You shouldn't just be focused on revenues. You should have all the things in place, particularly in terms of sports betting, so that you can detect, escalate and hopefully even be quite and prevent match fixing from taking place on your platform.
We see it as a duty of ours to our operators, the regulators we work with and even the end users to keep our platform at least as free as possible from potential integrity issues. And our risk management team and sports book control teams who work every day on this, they're handling around about 15 alerts every day every week, sorry, of potential integrity issues. They can be flagged by our partners that we've seen just before, externally or they could come from internally from our trading team as well, letting us know that maybe there's been some regular activity on event and can we look into it. We'll, of course, escalate any kind of suspicious activity we see to those aforementioned partners. And one thing is we don't just use that data just on a one off basis and escalate it and leave it there.
We accumulate all information. We have our own internal integrity database. And we leverage all of that information, all the experience that our traders have to inform and build our offering with integrity front and center. So we actually block around our 50 plus events every single day, because we can't guarantee the integrity of them. And we haven't got sufficient information to say we can fully trust that event.
Not to say that they're going to be fixed or anything in our eyes, but we'd rather focus our traders, our operations and indeed end users on events where we can fully say that we can trust them. And looking forward, we will continue to invest in integrity. We'll continue taking our proactive approach that we have to it. One thing I can say is also we apply transparency at all possible levels to our integrity setup. One thing is we supported our operator Kindred.
In 2017, they organized to have an integrity audit of their systems done by a company called Ephysport. So naturally, we supported them. With us doing the risk management trading for Kindred, a large part of the audit was focused on us and how we're set up. And we are proud to say that Kindred was given the result that they lead the pack on integrity, it was said. So we are very proud to give that result to Kindred.
We'll continue to apply those learnings that are shared sharing of information and cooperation, transparency to operations going forward. And we'll always be sure that integrity is front and center, so that we can keep the sports that we love free from manipulation.
Thank you very much.
Yes. Good afternoon, everyone. So my name is Erik Leggbauer. I'm Deputy CEO for Cambi. I head up the product organization of Cambi.
I will be joined here by our COO, Jonas Janssen and our CTO, Andreas, to walk you through what the theme we're planning for today is about this. So successfully navigating through conflicting demands. And I guess the way I think about our mission at Cambium, the product is really threefold. We're here to meet the demands of the end users and our operators on one hand. On the other hand, we're also here to really help grow in companies addressable markets so that Max and his team has more opportunities to sell into.
And the last part, building a bit on what Lars started with in this rapidly changing technological landscape to future proof our products so that we're also relevant in 3 5 years from now. And interesting in our positions then is that this often is really it's about conflicting demands to meet all these three needs. So we want to talk to you about how we address this at Cambly. And much of the focus will be specifically about our U. S.
Journey the last 2 years because I think it's a quite good showcase to the capabilities that we have been built up. Let me start a bit basic. What is that we actually do? What does any sports book do? What do you do when you deliver this end user product called sports betting?
You can look at it this way. Somewhere in the world, 300,000 events per year is played in all various types of sports that may have some relevance to some end users to bet on. We buy data from all these events in real time. And this data then streams into our system and our organization. So there we work with a mix of specialist traders and algorithms.
So we use that data to for any really type of occurrence of what can happen here to predict the outcome. So I think we heard before, today, we do in a month 480,000,000 predictions like that, which is what we call Odenstern. That's about 100 predictions per second. And we actually don't think that we get this right every time. It is impossible to, at that scale, with a quite small margin, get that probability right every time.
And that leads us on to the 3rd part here, which is really a core part of what we do, and that's the risk management. So in the life cycle of an OBS, as we publish it on the site, a lot of new information comes. You have bets being placed. You have market movements. You may have injury news.
You may have a really big bet or you may have a really high accumulated risk for 1 operator. And our risk management is about really optimizing at all times the price given this new information that we get. At the heart, really, of risk management for us comes what we call player profiling. So this is about for every end user really that does something with our product, we build a profile of future profitability of that player. In around 98% of the cases here, we don't really act on the information from end users from a risk management perspective.
But around 2% of the players, they actually come with new information to us that we use in the trading to adapt the price. Finally, the last part is, of course, is channeling this out to the players. So packaging this big offering in an exciting and intuitive user experience. You have the mobile client, the retail service terminal, the desktop. So I think over my years at Cambria here, I think I've learned that it is challenging in itself to optimize and reach perfection in one function.
That is a challenge, but it's totally doable. But really, the big challenge is making all these parts work really well together. And I think that is one of the key reasons to our success at Canopy. We have more specifically what I'm thinking about, we have always looked at this entire chain. Ever since I started in 2005, we have looked at this chain being about one thing.
And that's not about margin. That's not about accuracy and probability prediction. In the end, it is about user experience. It is about delivering entertainment. So our quant analysts, for instance, they're not tasked with the sort of theoretical challenge of only predicting probability.
They're tasked with the challenge of delivering a fantastic experience, if you think back of Christian's example of the football penalty. So we come from a UX experience. We do want to keep this open at all times. That is a really good experience. And that's what we come to our traders and mathematicians with.
Can you solve it for us? So end to end here, we're really thinking about user experience. We're as much measuring our traders and algorithms in the type of entertainment value they deliver. That drives turnover as much as we're measuring on the actual margin that they're predicting. So moving more on to B2B context then, that's about scaling this up.
And for us scalability is one thing about scaling to new customers. It's about scaling to new end users, scaling to new continents like U. S, scaling to new channels. And at all time, what we really want to protect is what you saw on the previous slide here, we want to protect that core product. We want to make that better and better and better, and we want to move forward at pace.
So that's the sort of contradiction here, handling a massive growth while still maintaining a scalable core for us. One big, I think, challenge of scalability and limitation, you may say really from a B2B perspective, we discovered around 2014. And that comes that is about differentiation. So back in 2010, the one word really to sum up our strategy was scalability. Around 2014, 2015, we had to evolve that and we had to add really differentiation to it.
So we still want to stay true to this scalable model, but we needed to try to find ways where we actually can open up this platform and this technology so that each operator can become unique and really drive towards their unique strategy. So today, we think about our this is not product strategy. This is really our entire business strategy. We think about it as scalable differentiation. And differentiation for us that is it's a very deliberate approach.
We're not really opening up this core that you saw in the beginning. That we believe needs to be done as an end to end chain really that we have control over. But all other areas, most notably the front end, there we invite our operators to come and innovate together with us. I think the biggest change that has happened for us here the last 4 years is when we really moved over from delivering a service, including a front end client. We then started also delivering a service where you don't need to take our client.
You can work directly on our APIs. You have our full product either end to end with a mobile and web client or you can work directly on our APIs and create this yourself. And it's only, I'll say, the last really one and a half, two years that our operators have started building they have started building up their own organizations. In some cases, like with Unibet, let's say, we build half, they build half. In the case of DraftKings, they have more or less built everything themselves.
So I'll say something more about the scalable differentiation. I think the easiest way to think about this as a strategy is the desired outcome that we're looking for. So we say that we will achieve this if we win significant operators with unique strategies at a premium price point without having to do bigger changes to our road map or organization. I think that's really when we think we have managed to connect all three parts there from the core product to scaling it up to adding the differentiation and all the way actually to aligning sales strategy and product strategy. That's what scalable differentiation is about.
Yes. So I think it's important to know that this is not only about product. It's as much, I think, about our sales department really working for us in product and vice versa, protecting our platform, selling what we are really good at. So moving over to U. S.
I think U. S, if we become a bit less theoretical, U. S, I think, is really a good use case to look about look at when we see, I think, some of these capabilities in action. They managed they made us manage to launch as number 1 in New Jersey and now leadership positions in U. S.
So I will hand over to Andreas to talk about the first two challenges here about going and scaling into
a new
continent with multiple new regulations as well as scaling into a new channel, the retail channel in the casinos. And then Jonas Janssen will talk to you about the new end user, the American end user serving their needs.
Thank you. My name is Andreas Sandberg. I'm the CTO of Cambly. So I'm going to talk about the 2 first challenges. And in order to do that, I'll need to spend some time in actually telling you the story of how we came to this capability.
Like the slide Oliver showed previously, we started with pretty much a great canvas. There was .com operations pretty much all across the world or in particular within EU boundaries anyway. And regulation started to happen. Italy was first. Back then, we were still part of Univet.
We didn't do anything in regards to Italy we launched, but that was entirely outsourced. And then France happened, and there was quite a significant impact for revenues for Unibet at that time because the business conditions were quite detrimental versus what they had been during the dotcom regime. So we realized that this is something that we really, really have to be able to deliver on, and we started to work on this. And that made us able to launch sort of a regulated solution for Denmark back in 2010. And we actually managed to switch Italy from an outsourced solution into in house as well.
Back then, we were maybe 5 development teams, and this took a significant part of our development capabilities just to be able to deliver a new regulation technically, process wise, installing servers, setting up APIs to regulators, etcetera, etcetera. But we started to hone these skills, and we were able to launch in Spain pretty much until that market opened up. And it was also the first time where we really saw that going into a regulated market is an excellent business lever because our first customers we signed, apart from Puff, was actually Spanish operators. I think the first three operators were actually Spanish. And then fast forwarding a bit, I might say also that this is regulation from sort of the Canby standpoint.
Northern Territory was regulated way before Canvys was started, so was U. K. But during the years from 'thirteen to 2017, we launched in quite a few different continents and countries across the globe. And South Africa was probably where we ended up in a situation that made us able to launch in the U. S.
Because they have a very difficult regulation in the sense that you have strike the best in South Africa. A lot of our business model centers around not being forced to do local deployments. We want to maintain the core and sort of not having a separate installed base, just trade in South Africa. That would never make any sense from a business point of view. Our entire business is high volume and low margins.
We have to really take care of the sort of the underlying fundamental capability of our company. But we had sort of honed our skills, and we were actually able to create a component specifically for South Africa that made sure that the bets were stricken in South Africa. And that capability was like the perfect solution for New Jersey, Pennsylvania and onwards. And this was we started development early 2017. In the end of 2017, maybe Q3, Q4, we realized that the Supreme Court hearing in December, this is probably going to happen.
We always thought that this would someday happen, but it became more or less a very high probability that this would happen in the end of December 2017. So then we started as always, we started to talk to the regulators. We showed the solution we had in order to sort of scale our business into new states, having the capability of actually strike the bets in state. We have the additional complexity with the Wire Act in the U. S.
As well. So we were honing our skills a little bit more. But this has really put us into pole position for launching anywhere. And we did the U. S.
Pretty much at the same time as we did Sweden and a few other regulations. So the scalability of our business now in terms of our ability to launch into new regulation is almost unlimited actually. I mean, we need to deploy a small level of infrastructure in any new state that has this requirement. But it's kind of a copy paste operation and we can do this at speed. Obviously, there might be regulations that have more stringent or quite different regulatory requirements, and then we have to do some development.
But for the most part, and so far in the U. S, we've been quite successful with this capability. So we're looking forward to the 40 or so states being regulated in the next 3 years. And the second challenge was retail. We've been running retail for quite some time before entering into the U.
S. Market. And our core strategy has always been to build on our core capabilities in terms of sports betting and the online experience. So we're trying to bring whatever we do online into the retail space as well with as little adjustments as possible. In order to do that, we have to be firm about where our service starts and ends.
So we're not doing any hardware, but we're really good at integrating into the hardware that you need in a retail operation. We do APIs for those who already have a massive installed base of over the counter or for like retail outlets like 8 gs in Sweden, which is the trotting monopoly. So that made us able to actually launch 6 on property sportsbook in the time span of just a few months in the U. S, New Jersey first and then, I think, 5 or 6 installations in Pennsylvania over the course of 2 months. And they're all different, but they're yet the same sort of interactive terminals, sort of interactive terminals.
I said I'm going to show you a short video of that later. But my main message here is that we're retail is not something that's kind of just bolt on to an online service. We're doing retail really well actually. So this is a movie from a launch at Parks Casino in outside Philadelphia. And one of the things that many U.
S. Operators, U. S. Casinos were quite skeptical about was our take on retain. We have sort of a self-service view.
We have the kiosks. That was quite a foreign concept for Americans. They were very sort of Till based. You go through over the counter, you place your bet, you get a paper slip, etcetera. We were emphasizing the ability to scale the sportsbook business with American operators.
You can imagine a place like this being absolutely packed when like any Philadelphia team is playing. There's going to be 100 and 100 and 100 of people more than willing to place a bet on anything during that game. It can be quite crowded. And without having the self-service terminals, it's massive queues.
I don't know if
you've been
So today on the tank.
So that was a demo. I'm not going to show that. And then for 8 gs, which is the horse racing monopoly in Sweden, we launched 2 minutes past midnight for all their online and retail service. So they're using this concept of wallpapers, interactive wallpapers, where you can browse their horse racing, which is their own internal. But at the same time, you can use the Cambie Sports betting, which is powered by Cambie, built on our APIs.
So it contains all the elements of our online service, but it's brought to the retail channel. In Sweden, you're not allowed to put cash into machines. You have to go to the teller. So you go to the teller, you pay your bet, but you have a QR code on the bet, so it's automatically scanned and being placed. And we're also trying to bridge the gap between retail and online.
And obviously, U. S. Being a market where retail is kind of going first in most states, it's important for us and for our operators to kind of familiarize the audience with the notion of online betting. And again, it's quite a lot of people at the sportsbook at large events. So we have built this solution where you can actually find your selection.
You can place or sort of you can place your bet or at least create the bet slip and that creates a QR code that you can go to the over the counter and just show that it's being scanned and you pay. So there is no sort of selection process taking place at the till, but you're sort of speeding up the process of actually placing the bet quite a bit. You can also use this capability obviously for on prem mobile. Mobile betting in the U. S.
Is usually that usually means that you're at the casino within the casino compound. It's not online in the sense that we think of mobile betting. You can use a solution like this as well. You can have hostesses or hostesses to walk around the casino floor. Someone can select their bet and just scan that, hand over the money and your bet is placed.
And one of the things that we have done in order to be able to do this is obviously to streamline the launch process for I mean our ability to launch 6 or 7 casinos in a short time, one of the things that we've spent a lot of time on is actually improving the launch process as much as possible. It's quite a large operation, including logistics and configuration, etcetera, etcetera. We're at the point right now where we could, for an operator that has sort of already an installed base and want to go into new casino, just send them a USB stick really. And for them to just plug it in, it will automatically configure itself, connect to our services and be up and running within a very short time frame. So the latest launch for parks in Pennsylvania, we were practically not involved with.
And that's not to say we're sort of leaving our customers to their own luck in terms of installing this, but we want to make this process as seamless and as efficient
as possible.
So we're looking forward to more states regulating and more casino properties opening. And now I hand over to Johan Johan Sjonsson.
Hi. My name is Jonas Janssen, and I'm CEO of Cambly. I'm going to talk you through what we have done to deliver for the new end users in the U. S, but also, I mean, what we are continuing doing and right now and a bit in the future. Of course, I will not dig into everything, but I will take snippets here and there so you get an understanding of what the challenge has been.
And at the same time, I also hope we can get an understanding of how kind of strategically we are looking into when we develop the product. And I want to reiterate one thing that Andreas said around the self-service terminals. So I was visiting parks last week in the U. S, and it was 3 Wednesday. So it wasn't super busy in the casino, but the self-service terminals were busy and the over the counters were totally empty.
And the CEO of Parks Resort, he has come to me and smiled, and he thinks it's excellent because, of course, that's increased the efficiency for them in the casino the more people that go to the self-service terminals. So localizing the product. So first of all, I mean we have been doing this in the past. We've been localizing products for Colombia. We have been localizing for the U.
K. And so on. But the U. S. A.
Is a bigger challenge, first of all, because it's have even though I mean the sports betting has been legal only in Nevada, it really have a different look and feel, a localized sports book. So from that aspect, it's a little bit more challenging. And then also the importance for us because the market will grow and be so a big part of our revenues. So what we have done when it comes to the localization before we went live is a lot of things here. I mean, we have, I mean, obviously, changed the odds.
We have changed how you present the different bet offers. You have the home team after the home team and so on. It changes to the clock, to the terminology and bet types. But I think one interesting part to look into is what we call TSYS. So in the U.
S, they have the concept of TSES where on the mainline, you can add more points. So and that's built on a table. So it's not really built on the actual odds. So for us, either we could have the choice to just copy what was existing in the U. S.
Market at the time or try to utilize the handicaps we already had because today, we are already pricing all the handicaps. So add 4 points in basketball or 6 points in American football is nothing new for us. So because of us doing that, it became more of a front end challenge, and we didn't need to go into the back end and change the actual calculations. Because of that, we were saving time when we built it. And also, we could brand it T Cell Plus because on average, the end user will get a much better odds with our solution than they get with the table.
So this is ways, I mean, around scalability that we need to think about when we build it to do things in a clever way. This will not be used in Europe maybe, but we utilize the product we already have to do it in a better way in a new region. During the time now, we are doing a lot of U. S. Research, both ourselves and together with our partners.
So the localization has at no means stopped here. We will continue to build and make our product more and more American for the American users. I think we will go in now to the next slide and look more to what we are doing now around the offering and see what's happening there. So of course, when we went into the U. S, we also had to increase our offer, especially in the American sports.
So this came at the same time when we saw that we really have to update our trading platform. And the reason to do that is to get a more holistic trading platform, which in between what we call the core sports book, in event combination, bet builders and also player specials. I will not go through the player specials in this session, but you think about it as a third one. So strategically, we should stand as I mean, so much is happening in the U. S, to focus mainly on the U.
S. Sports together with soccer. So when we look at the core sportsbook, so this is really our, I mean, trading system. So it's now an integrated system pretty much alive. This is, of course, not our first version.
It's our 4th version of trading systems. And we have, as of now, rolled out baseball and basketball in production. They are not, I mean, fully finished yet. We will continue to develop on them to add features all the time. But Baseball and Basketball is out in production.
That's why they are green. American football will be out with the new version before NFL starts in the autumn. And then we will do soccer and ice hockey at a later stage. So from a quality perspective, Erik talked about that when we look at the products and the traders, we don't only look at the margins. Important aspect of it is to evaluate the quality of the product.
So after releasing Basketball, we have seen up to 50 percent improvement in the KPIs we are following from a U. S. Perspective. So that's one reason of it. The other reason is for us to be able to increase the number of events that one trader can handle at the same time.
So this will also continue to increase the efficiency in the operation we are doing. So for next season in U. S, it depends a little bit on what feeds we will have, but we are prepared for college basketball to offer up to 5,000 college basketball events next year. This year, this season, I think available feeds were around 3,000, 3,500. So but it's also an expectation that the feed providers will cover more events.
In college football, we will be able to cover up around 800 events next season. On the professional sports, NFL, MLB and so on, we, of course, cover all events in live betting.
But
when we develop these new trading tools, it's not only about the tools. I mean a huge aspect of it is the modeling. And same here, I mean, it's not the first version or first iteration of the models that we are currently using for the American sports. So last season, we went live with a new American football model, and the ambition is to have further upgraded American football model before this season starts. Baseball, we are just now rolling out a new version iteration of the baseball model.
All of this, I mean, we are doing, of course, to, I mean, improve the user experience but also to be able to offer more markets. The last few years, we also started to look more into machine learning models in order to add predictive capacities into the models. So for pretty much, we have been live with certain leagues for up to 2 years now where it's really the models we're pricing, I mean, the markets and the traders just overviewing what goes out on the site. We also I mean, to oversee this, have a big team of traders. And I want to cover a little bit, I mean, about the American office.
We're in the process of opening an office in Philadelphia. And the long term aim, I mean, what we have is that we should not increase the trading team. I mean, that should stay as it is and longer term, I mean, be smaller. Now when we're opening in the U. S, what we look for a lot is Oliver's team, Sportsbook Control and the Risk team to have people in the U.
S. To get them closer to our operators because that will support in the service level we can give to them. We are also looking for specialist U. S. Traders, and that's to complement the U.
S. Trading team that we have in London and other places. I think it can be interesting as well to talk a bit I mean, when we look at the U. S. Trader, what are we looking at hiring because that might not be exactly the same as another bookmaker or trader look for.
So the profile of the first so we signed now I think 3 or 4 traders or others compilers who will start when we open the office. And the profile of the 1st trader we hired was he's just graduated from an Ivy League University. He has been playing baseball on the university team, and he has a high analytical capability. And it's from my opinion, it's fantastic to be able to hire that kind of people into our organization. And that's something we have seen in other locations, especially in London in the past as well, that it is to be in this industry, you can attract super skilled people from university who are interested to work with sports, and that's the biggest passion.
So it's a good place to be in. So the next part of the trading platform is in event BetBuilder is the possibility to combine different outcomes within an event. We have released that for Sotke now, and we have these 3 American sports in train. They will be, in the first step, a little bit more simplified version. So it will not include player specials and so on, but it will be the possibility to combine the main bet offers.
I will not go so much into detail into the vet builder and exactly how it's built. But I think in the next picture, I will point out a couple of interesting pieces. And here, I will reflect on the U. S. Research.
So now when we talk with end users in the U. S, they can't understand that this hasn't been possible because that's the behavior that has been in the U. S. And it's partly driven because the offering has been much smaller than it has been in Europe. So then it's fairly easy to do these kind of combinations.
While in Europe, if you look, the offering has increased this much. And then now we are trying to do this afterwards. And that is not always so easy. So I will go into we can have a look at our Bet Builder and then afterwards look at the challenges. Yes.
So this is was supposed to be an animation, but I think it works very good in this way because that's what I need. So you can populate here with 3 different bet offers, so total end to win, total goal scored and both team to score and then place that combination bet. But one thing that the challenge is here is from a technology and a model perspective, the performance needed to ask for this combination because a normal bet offer, you can save down the probabilities in tables and it's readily available when you want to place the bet. Here, it's so many different combination and each of them is unique. So you run into a kind of a performance problem when you're going to ask for this each and every time.
The second one is here, it's had been a possibility for us to outsource this part of the product and use that one in conjunction with our core. However, as we see this is now it is a different tab up here that is just kind of front end because that's how they are used to present today. This is not necessarily how it's going to be in the future. In the future, Erik talked about the core. This will be the core because if you looked at the American user that we talked about, they are used to combine everything.
So why would that not apply to the European user even though the offering is much bigger? And then for our core, we need to be able handle this and build that internally. And hence, that's a product development decision that we can't outsource. It's something we need to be able to build internally. So we have talked now quite a bit about I mean, what we have been doing and what we are doing.
I would also like to just finish off with a video of I mean, the product we have today is pretty good. So it's a video of NBA playoffs last year, and it's same as NBA playoffs this year. And it is the instant betting product for basketball. If you follow the video, you will be able to see how you can bet on in each kind of possession on next field goal. And you will also have player specials on the most kind of famous players in each teams.
And a whistle off the ball.
So there you have the next field goal.
Sheppard picks up his first. James getting a rest. What a start. 15 points on
7 of 8 from the
field.
Art screen set up shut with Curry has love on, pulls back, fires a 3, knocks it down. Step Curry with his first field goal. And to me, that's got you've been trapping him.
Then next, possession, you can add the next field goal and bet straight again on it.
This is
something I mean, Christian showed in the beginning the penalties. If you go back in time, I mean, 10 minutes, we were the first really to produce the games and the points in play. And for a certain segment of our play end users, this is something they really like. But it's also something that pushes us all the time to offer a really, really good product. I have quite interesting anecdote.
So it was Oliver when he talked earlier, he mentioned that he was traveling around in the U. S. Having some presentations as different regulatory events. I'm not sure which one this was, but I think it was early autumn last summer. Then the day before, Oliver and our legal representative was going to have their presentation.
It was a CEO panel in the U. S. And on that one, it was one CEO from a company who mentioned that we can't offer live betting on basketball because it's too fast. And the day after, Oliver and Tomaso showed this slide, so of course, we can offer live betting on basketball. It's I mean just about the setup you have and we promise you that the players in the U.
S. Will love this product as much as they do in Europe. And what we have seen so far is that the proportion of turnover on this market is actually slightly higher in the U. S. Than it is in Europe.
So it's it works there as well. So thanks a lot.
So I will talk through about, I think, our top three really capabilities that we're now focused on building up. Think a bit more probably 3 to 5 years that we want to prepare for. Number 1 for us, it really ties in a lot to what Jonas is talking about. We phrase it as making algorithms and data 1st class citizens within Cambly. I think us like many other companies, we've for some time run around like headless chickens wondering how AI change our business and our industry.
I think we have stopped with that. And we're not focusing so much about AI. We're really focusing down to the actual data and what that will mean. So it becomes, I think, for us in our industry, it becomes quite obvious how this will change. I mean, it comes down to back to our core, the probability prediction and the user experience and the risk management.
As the data becomes richer and richer, you will you and your competitors will be able to make better and better predictions. And as the data becomes richer and richer, you and your competitor will be able to offer new interesting experiences. Like I think the video we saw before here is probably cutting edge of what's possible today with the data that is available from an offering perspective and to be able to predict those probabilities. But this is changing rapidly. We have some companies now, they with image recognition, they are able to set the fatigue level in NBA players.
Obviously, that is if you do that right, that can drastically change the odds compared to a human being just watching the match when it gets that rich. You have several of the leagues now starting to discuss putting a chip in the puck or in the ball. There's probably some political hurdles in that, but that definitely will happen as well. We have looked at an API from one league where they actually they give us the XYZ coordinates of the ball or the pack where EBITDA may be, And they update that I think 200 times per second. And you get all the players and the rotation of them.
I Anyone is quite far away from having the capabilities to utilize this in sports betting, I think for most industries. But for us, it's obvious that this change is happening. So technically, process wise, people organization, we're really moving towards where the algorithms really becomes a, I think, a first priority for Cambium. This is really paving the way for algorithms to be developed, to be tested, to be enhanced and really to be using the data that is available. Second one, so large scale agile development.
We talked before about more or less doubling the number of development teams over the past 18 months. And we're increasing that again this year with another 35%. And it's I guess when you're 10 development teams, what you need to be really good at is asking them to do build the right things. When we're getting closer towards 40 50 teams, it becomes possibly even more as important to actually how you work with these teams, how you have 50 teams on one product the company really has. We don't have really distinct separated products.
We build 1 sportsbook. So they're all dependent on each other. So we work really hard now on trying to figure out for the future, coming 50 development teams, how will this actually work, again, from a people, process and technology perspective. Last capability I wanted to mention around an ecosystem to help innovation across the industry. So we have identified that the enabling technology we have built out for the differentiation we talked about before, the APIs to build your own user experience, the bonus systems, the flexibility our operators have to adjust the prices still based on our core trading and risk management.
We think that there's today, our operators are using this. We think that this can further evolve to become a really powerful ecosystem. We're actually probably back to where Christian started. We didn't go into B2B sports betting to be an alternative to cut costs or to help failing sports. But we went into this to really in the end deliver a model where better user experiences can happen because of the outsourced model, because of more efficiency in the outsourced model, delivering more end user value basically.
We think of a bit the development we have seen in the sports book up until now, it's quite linear. It is quite slow. It is smaller adaptations and improvements like the live betting come around 2,005. Many regulations often to the end user value 5 years later, you're adding mobile, you're adding cash out. And now probably the most recent one in terms of innovation to the industry is the Bet Builder.
It's not a rapid change, and it's not a huge change. It's still about placing a bet on your team and see if you win, although it's changing with live and mobile, the channel, of course. What we saw already in 2010 was that a big reason that this is not happening so fast is that everyone is doing the same thing for themselves, more or less. So you have around 20 or 30 or 40 sportsbooks. They're all building this from the bottom up.
They all have to go through the heavy lifting of becoming compliant in Italy and then that next regulation, then adding this to the mobile channel, etcetera. So what Kunder was all about was really let us do that heavy lifting, and we open up in the U. S. And other areas, open up with the data so that you really can bring something new to your end users in there. And this is around that ecosystem and this capability that we're again, it's about the process, it's about the collaboration, about the co creation with operators.
It's about inviting more third parties to really utilize the powerful platform that we have built to come innovate together with us, to springboard innovation. Yes, that's it for us in product. Thank you very much.
Good afternoon. I'm David Kenyon, CFO. I guess today we've heard about people and culture. We've heard about our sales efforts. We've heard about our work with integrity and probity.
We've heard about products. We've heard about tech and retail. I guess I'm trying to tie it all together here and see what it's doing for our business model and for our financial prospects moving forward. Let's start with revenues. So our revenue model is predominantly a revenue share.
So I'd say around 90% of our revenue is coming from a revenue share. And that's us taking commission on the stakes of our operators, less payouts, less gaming tax in regulated markets and in some contracts, capped deductions for free bets, incentives towards player behavior. And we take a commission then on that. There is then approximately 10% is additional from fixed elements of revenue and some recharges for live events data. Some facts and figures in our most recent quarter.
71% of our revenues were from regulated markets, incurring the gaming tax we see there. Operator GGR, gross gaming revenue, that was up 46% on the prior year. And after all these deductions, growth of 36% for the operator NGL became 28% for us, so a 76% conversion. Just some of the metrics we look at for what's driving our revenue. You may have seen this index we present every quarter.
It really shows the in blue, the revenue growth sorry, the turnover growth of our operators. So starting at 100 back in Q1 'fourteen, growing 4x, 398 in our most recent quarter. And this is an aggregation of all the stakes placed with our operators. And the second part driving the gross gain revenue is the margin. So here you see the orange line.
It fluctuates a bit. I'll come on to that, why it fluctuates and why it's a little bit hard to predict sometimes. But really, the main message here is the continued underlying growth of the business. So that's our existing operators growing faster than the market. There's new operators riding on.
And it's regulatory developments, which open up new potential revenues for us. There are seasonal impacts in our business, probably more than many businesses. In particular, football and NFL seasons were important for us. So that's very much Q4, Q1 focused and halfway into Q2. And then every 2nd year, we have a major international football tournament, which is yes, can be very important and is going to make or break the result for the quarter.
I wanted to a bit more detail than we have before on this operating margin. It gets a lot of attention when we present the results. We internally have a bit of a different view on it. It can really fluctuate short term. So what this graph is showing is a range.
And over the last 2 years, on a rolling weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual basis in that last 2 years, also in the highest and lowest trading margin we've seen. On a daily basis, the highest was just under 33%, and we had a minus 15% day. So you can see kind of quite huge fluctuations on a daily basis. But as the time period gets longer, the range gets smaller and smaller. So yes, probably our worst rolling week has been 1.5%, our best 14%, so the range of 12%, 12.5%.
And then that narrows on a quarterly basis to 2.5% sorry, 3.5% range and down to under 2% on a full year basis. So I think the main message is, the way we looked at it, we don't worry if there are these short term fluctuations. The real focus is on growing the turnover of the operators through new signings, through growing them, growing the existing ones as fast as we can, and the margin will ultimately be steady. So on a long term basis, over the last 24 months, it's been 8%. And there are lots of factors which impact this margin, which can make it, of course, quite hard to predict on a short term basis.
Firstly, different products and betting patterns in the different geographies we operate in. We saw Jonas talking about the BetBuilder product. That's inherently an accumulated product, which will drive higher margins. So there's something where we're offering, which will slightly change behaviors over time. The customer portfolio, you've seen mention of customers in Colombia, U.
S, of course, across Europe, we have customers in Mexico and Cambodia. In every location, they have different cultures, different betting cultures and different betting patterns. So as that evolves over time, that's going to change potentially our margin. Price differentiation tools. This is basically us giving the different operators the ability to change the margin based on the probabilities that the odds compilers are giving.
And that can actually push the margin up or down, depending on whether the operator wants to be aggressive and be able to market a particular event being a high with a high payback or if they want to be conservative and take a high margin. And finally, mention CUS, just in its own right, could change ultimately the trading margin for the group, likely to be a slightly lower margin potentially than Europe and other places where we are currently, typically due to more singles betting and no draws in the major sports there. So yes, lots of pushes and pulls on the margin. We're going to have to monitor it. We currently guide on 6.5% to 8%.
I think some of these as different parts of these business become more important than that, we'll decide if we change that guidance. And one big point to mention is the correlation between the turnover and the margins. So if there's a high margin in a given quarter, that can really suppress operator turnover and vice versa, a low margin can lead to higher turnover. So yes, I'd say one our main message in all of this is we stick with the guidance for now. And if there is a short term fluctuation, we don't worry about it, and we hope you wouldn't too.
If we look back since the start, our revenue has been growing around on average of 21% a year, 23% last year. And like I mentioned before, this is going to be the same factors are going to apply for future revenue growth. Can we grow our existing operators and how fast? Can we have new operators? And what regulatory developments are going to change our outlook?
And what's the tax rate in those jurisdictions. We do look on regulatory developments as a kind of a double edged sword. Yes, it comes with a tax, but typically comes with sales opportunities as well. So our costs are going up around 0 point 1 € since we started. And I'd say that's really a deliberate level of investment that we've had since the start to build the market leading sportsbook.
Without doing that, we wouldn't have been able to sell to the 25 operators we've sold to so far and all the great stuff you've heard about today. That's all driven by that deliberate level of cost growth. We have actually raised our cost guidance slightly going forward, 4% to 6% quarterly growth. I'd say that's a continued building of the sports book in line with what you've seen historically. But now we have this additional factor of regulation in the U.
S, which is, for now at least, in the short term, driving additional costs. Very important to say that the majority of our cost base is fixed. And we'll come on to the variable parts shortly. But really, everything you've heard about today is predominantly a fixed cost element. And there isn't a direct cost a link between our costs and our revenues.
So as we grow revenues, that is not per se what's driving the cost growth. Our costs over half is staff costs and amortization of previously capitalized staff costs. And the rest is the office, it's marketing, it's travel, it's data to support the live events. So what are the 57% of our costs doing? The largest part is operating a smart market leading sportsbook.
It's the traders, it's the compilers, it's the event settlement, it's the event schedulers, it's all the IT support. And then you've heard today on all these different areas of the business, which are driving additional costs. So expansion of offering for all operators. You've seen all elements of user experience. Automation is work to make us more efficient internally.
Differentiation is the APIs that the other guys talked about. Retail, you've seen the whole piece on our channel expansion into retail. This is something we didn't do a large part of when we first started, and it's really developed part of our business. And of course, that brings costs with it. We expand into new markets.
So we've seen listed here some of the main ones, the U. S, South Africa, South America. And we integrate new customers. As one of the signs, it's a relatively small chunk of variable cost. It's fairly quick and easy.
But yes, it does come with it's part of our resource goes into that. So our scalability, that's really a critical part of our business model. The variable costs I talked about, the largest part of the live events data. So that's additional live events costs when we take on new operators, but we do recharge those costs. Then with our new operators, we have account managers and technical support many travel to the site to support those operators.
As I mentioned, integration costs are limited, and we use existing resource, so it's not new costs for the business. And the critical thing here, and this has been the principle that we've had since day 1, we provide one service for all operators. We're not building new elements for new operators. And that impacts both in terms of product development and the trading side of the business. So it's a very scalable model.
There's been a lot of focus, of course, on the U. S. Are we also scalable in the U. S? Yes, we are.
The slight cost increase is this in particular is driven by these upfront costs for new regulations. Due diligence, advisory fees, lawyers fees and some local technical setup, so servers within state. As Jonas mentioned, we are opening a new office in Philadelphia. That's a kind of local support for our partners out in the U. S.
And some deeper expertise on those U. S. Sports. But in principle, the cost of setting up a new operator and the scalability I've talked about applies equally in the U. S.
As it does in Europe. And these are costs that we actually don't mind. So as soon as we have a commercial deal in a given state, we'll be generating revenues from day 1. As I mentioned, we've, from the very start, had a deliberate strategy of investing and continuing our cost growth, and that's really to build some clear water between us and the competitors. And we think that the setup we've got is extremely scalable.
I'm going to carry on with it. I think we've got a really strong platform for this in terms of our strong balance sheet. So at the end of Q1, we had net assets just under £61,000,000 with cash, £33,000,000 We do capitalize our development costs. We had net asset net intangibles of £13,000,000 at the end of Q1 as capitalized costs on development projects, which were taking over 3 years. For cash generative, we made €8,600,000 pounds extra cash in 2018 with a very high conversion from net profit to cash flow.
It flows pretty much directly through cash. One of the reasons why we've been so keen on building a strong balance sheet is for the impact it has on our commercial sales cycles. It's often the first question asked by operators. What's your balance sheet? Are you going to be around for 5, 10 years to support us?
So clearly, we want to be able to answer yes. And so that's along with the our transparency as a listed company are 2 of the big factors that Max and his team use in the sales cycles. And I think overall, this strong balance sheet gives us a very high level of flexibility as we look forward, whether it's M and A or other uses of cash. So this is our EBIT development. For GBP 12,000,000 last year, and you can see the revenue has been growing at a higher pace than the cost.
And this growth in profits, that really enables us to build this clear water I've talked about to our competitors. The cost growth, I could say, has come from the start, and it's everything you've heard of today, from the regulation to building out the sales team to the tech and the products and the retail developments you heard about. I think now we're in an extremely strong position to take the business to the next level, A wonderful customer portfolio, a market leading product you've seen examples of today. Oliver talks about the regulation and our approach there. I think we're in a really strong position from a regulatory front and a scalable business model I've described here.
I think we're in a fantastic position for the future. And now I think it's a Q and A. And we have