Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us. I'm here with Jonathan to answer your questions following our announcement this morning. Hopefully you've all had a chance to watch the presentation that we published on our website this morning. I won't repeat what has been said there, but will just make a few opening comments. 2020 was a remarkable year for Flutter. We completed our merger with The Stars Group in May, and in December, we accelerated our buy-in to the minority shareholders in FanDuel, something we were very keen to do given the scale of the opportunity we see in North America. I'm pleased to say that our business is performing very well. The growth we are delivering is being built on sustainable foundations with significant recreational customer growth in all our key regions.
Throughout 2020, our average monthly online players grew 19%, with that growth accelerating during the year. Average player growth globally was 32% in H2. Merge integration continues to progress well. You'll have seen that we have upgraded our cost synergy guidance this morning. As we said before, our number one priority is ensuring that the momentum in the business is not negatively impacted by integration work, but I'm pleased that we've been able to identify further efficiencies whilst maintaining strong momentum. Whilst performance in all of our regions has been strong, our ongoing leadership position in the U.S. is particularly encouraging. We now believe the U.S. market opportunity will be materially bigger than we had previously estimated, with a TAM of $20 billion by 2025. While the returns profile we have highlighted this morning clearly shows the embedded value we're building in that business.
2021 has started well, and while our retail business is still being impacted by COVID-related closures, the strong underlying momentum in our online businesses is expected to offset this. With that, I'll open it up for questions. In the interest of giving everyone the chance to ask a question, can I ask that you limit yourselves to two each in the first instance? Then if we have time, we'll be happy to answer any follow-ups you may have.
Thank you. Your first question is coming from Ed Young of Morgan Stanley.
[crosstalk] Good morning, Ed.
Morning, Ed.
Morning, both. Thank you for taking my questions. The first one is on your triple step responsible gambling measures. I'm very struck by what you've done there. I guess my question is that on a global basis or is that largely in your legacy markets? I'm aware your tech platform is pretty across the U.S., and maybe that explains some of it. Are there any differences between your responsible gambling measures and steps across your global businesses, particularly regarding the U.S., given player values and spend appears to be so high there relative to some of the other markets? My second question is around the buy-out of the FanDuel minorities. My understanding when that was done originally was that the exercise in the summer will continue to be a fair market value exercise.
Obviously, since then, Fox have said that they'd be able to exercise the option at last private mark. Can you give a view on how you think that process is going to go in the summer? If possible, I can add on a part B, your general view on the Fox assets. A lot of discussion about FanDuel brand, FanDuel returns. Any comment on the returns you're seeing in Fox in the U.S.? Thanks.
Thanks, Ed. Well, look, I might just take them in reverse order. Look, we're pleased with the way that the Super 6 asset has performed with nearly four and a half million in our customers on that platform. It's clearly going to be a very valuable database for us to cross-sell into. I've talked in the past of some of the struggles we're having with the quality of the product for FOX Bet, which is something which is definitely hampering the ability for that business to get the traction it needs and is a really good reminder for us of what it's like to be one of these subscale operators in America because we sometimes forget the difficulties they face when we look at the fantastic results that the FanDuel business is delivering as the number one player there in that market.
In terms of the mechanism for dealing with Fox and the rights that we negotiated with them as part of the purchase or the deal we did with The Stars Group, we haven't put anything formal in place this moment, but we will honor our commitment to give Fox an option to acquire 18.6% of FanDuel at fair market value in July 2021. To be clear on the valuation, Fox will have to pay the fair market value, which is different from the negotiated price agreed between Flutter and Fastball, which reflected the specific circumstances that Fastball found itself in. The valuation will be carried out in the same manner that would have occurred had Fastball still owned the stake.
As a reminder for those of you, two banks will value the business, and if the valuations are within a narrow enough range, the average of the two will be taken. In the event that there's a wide disparity between the two valuations, a third valuer nominated and agreed by ourselves and Fox will value the asset, and whichever of the first two valuations is furthest away from the third will be discarded, and then an average of the two remaining valuations will be taken. That's the mechanism we use. In terms of your first question, look, we think that the approach we've taken to the triple step around affordability is important, and it's an important component of the race to the top that we're trying to engineer here in the U.K. from a safer gambling perspective.
We aren't just confining ourselves to thinking about safer gambling in the U.K., though. You'll have seen, I'm sure, the recent announcements around the changes that we've made in the Irish market with regards to credit cards as well as the restrictions on advertising. We've decided to do that on a unilateral basis, even without getting agreement from the other operators in the market. Safer gambling is something that's very important to us across the market, whether that's in sports betting in Australia or indeed in FanDuel in the U.S.
Thanks very much. Very clear on thoughts. Just a follow-up on the responsible gambling ones. Could you give us any kind of color about where the current framework sits versus the U.K. or global market, or what ambitions you have to align it? Was it just not as appropriate at this stage of the market, or is there any restriction in terms of technology? Just in terms of your ambitions for where you'd like to get it to and on what sort of timeline would be very useful.
Yeah, look, there are no sort of restrictions from a technology perspective. What I would say is that the concept of the framework whereby we assess customers when they join us, then we have sort of ongoing extensive monitoring of our online customers and then have interactions to help support customers is something which is used for us all around the world. Actually, we published some stats today. You can see that 40% of our Sky Bet customers, for example, already have a deposit limit in place and within the Paddy Power Betfair brand, the customers had interactions and then went on to put in place deposit limits or sort of timeouts on their account. We believe the approach we're taking is working and we'll, I'm sure, find ways to continue to improve it in time.
We're pleased with where it's helping support customers at this time.
Thanks very much.
Thank you. Your next question is coming from Gavin Kelleher of Goodbody. Please go ahead.
Good morning, Jonathan. Morning, Peter.
Morning, Gavin.
Just on the U.S., could you give any comment around CPAs and how they're trending in H2 and into this year? Any comment on CPAs in the U.S.? That's my first question. My second question relates to the percentage of net revenue going through cost of goods sold in the U.S. Obviously very high or much higher year-on-year, 46% in 2020. I presume that's a function of the relationship between net revenue and gross and then Pennsylvania making up a much bigger mix of the U.S. business in 2020. Could you just give us any sort of flavor on how you expect that to trend in 2021 and 2022 based on the states that you're seeing likely to launch in those years?
Good morning, Gavin. Look, in terms of the CPA data, look, we're very pleased with the way that the business is performing. Clearly, we've had a terrific start to 2021. We outlined the results that we saw around the Super Bowl to acquire 350,000 customers in that week which is more than we acquired in the preceding year. It was something which we're delighted about. I think for us, the fact that we continue to see such strong growth from some of our existing early states really gives us excitement about how big the opportunity can become for us. I'll let Jonathan pick up on the point around net revenue in the U.S., there's this sort of mixed effects going on over there. The only point I'd add to Peter's comment is we're not obsessing about CPAs.
What we're obsessing about is CPA relative to LTV. As we see, we talked about the retention rates being 80% better than we see elsewhere in the world. That really does drive LTV and therefore, we're really happy with the LTV to CPA equation and those sort of paybacks. In states where there's greater products in terms of both sports betting and gaming, you're happy to see your CPAs go higher because your LTVs are higher. I think that's the critical point for us is about paybacks. On the second point, which is around cost of goods sold, obviously, you get much higher cost of goods sold in terms of sports and casino with market access fees plus particularly taxes than you do on DFS. As you see the mix going away from DFS towards sports and casino, you see that going up.
You also see that some of these taxes are paid on GGR, so where we've got higher level of bonusing, particularly as states start up, you also see a boosted level. I think we'll just see what happens with the mix as we go through this year. Certainly, I think 2019 is less representative than 2020 in terms of cost of sales, cost of goods sold. I'd probably look at 2020 as being a better proxy than 2019, that's for sure.
Perfect. Thanks, Jonathan. Thanks, Peter.
Cheers, Gavin.
Thank you. Your next question is coming from the line of Michael Mitchell of Davy. Please go ahead.
Yes, good morning, both. Thanks for taking my questions. Two on the U.S., if I could. First of all, just in terms of product. Clearly the importance of product leadership in the U.S. is becoming more apparent both at market level and I guess in your own numbers this morning in terms of share gains and customer retention. I just wonder, could you comment on how your current U.S. product compares to an average European product in terms of features, bets, markets, et cetera, and really what the kind of the near term of the 2021 pipeline looks like from a kind of product release perspective. That's my first question. Then second of all, on your DFS activations, clearly still the key component of the customer acquisition funnel.
I wonder when you think about the reactivation since the return of sports, I wonder if you could just provide some color in terms of how the DFS customer base is evolving when you consider across states that already have live sports betting markets versus those to come in the future. Thank you.
Good morning, Michael. From a product perspective, I think for those of you who are familiar with one of our products here in the U.K. or Ireland, I think you'd be surprised when you saw the product we have in the U.S. I think it is pretty well positioned. There's clearly more to do. We're pleased with the way in which we've managed to sort of integrate things like Same G ame Parlay into the product. We sort of own that product, it's fully built into the customer experience rather than sort of hanging out in the side, which often happens if you acquire this stuff from third parties. There's definitely some more work we need to do from a casino perspective. We have the best casino product in the world as a result of the acquisition of The Stars Group.
We're really pleased with that casino platform, so we'll be able to improve the casino product in the U.S., which as you'll have seen from our results, is an important component of the U.S. market and I think we've been really pleased and surprised actually, at the extent to which we've been able to drive cross-sell in the U.S. market around the casinos. Look, there's more to do around sports and casino. The fact that we're getting the business onto our own tech end-to-end and it will be fully there by this coming football season, is something which will really help us accelerate our journey. As a reminder for you, whilst we are running the business on our own Global Betting Platform, the U.S. team have their own version of it, so they're able to make their own bespoke developments to suit their market.
They can steal with pride from other divisions as well, which we think gives us a really sort of powerful platform for driving fast innovation across the business. In terms of DFS, your point around sort of DFS aspirations, I haven't got the stats and Jonathan may know in terms of the differential between the performance of the DFS-sourced customers after the return to sport as opposed to the sort of new-to-franchise ones. I'm not aware of any sort of differences of stuff like that but one thing I would point out is we've actually been really pleased with the way in which we've been able to continue to grow and acquire customers onto the DFS platform.
Our hypothesis when we acquired FanDuel was whilst we thought we'd see good growth in sports betting, we didn't think we'd be able to sort of maintain the contribution and indeed the customer numbers around DFS. We've been really pleased with the way that that business has continued to perform and of course, today, it's still acting as a very significant source of customers for us in the States where we're live and allows us to attract and acquire customers to the FanDuel brand in states in advance of them regulating.
Super. Many thanks.
Thanks, Michael.
Thank you. Your next call is coming from James Rowland Clark of Barclays. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone. I just wondered if I could follow up on the safer gambling measures question from earlier. In your presentation, you say 40% of PPB customers are signed up for those measures. Is that a higher number for the U.K.? I assume it is. Do you have any targets about where you'll get to on those measures by the end of this year? A sort of follow-up would be, at what point, or maybe you could remind us at what point you substantially put those measures in place for PPB customers. My second question is on the U.S. DraftKings said the other day that they're seeing about 50% cross-sell from sports betting to iGaming in their core states. Please could you let us know what yours is and is that an area that you can improve in?
You're obviously holding sports betting market share at a very high level but your iGaming share has slightly fallen. Thank you.
Thanks, James. I think I've just made sure I was sort of clear about the points I made with that earlier. In the Sky Bet business, 40% of revenues are coming from customers with deposit limits in place, which we're really pleased with. It's an ongoing journey for us. The extent to which we can encourage more customers to put those limits in place, I think that would be a good thing. Through this COVID situation, we've had to be pretty nimble and change the way in which we monitor and assess customers and there have been new guidelines from the Gambling Commission which we've made sure we've adhered to. I think for us, what's really reassuring is that the Sky Bet and Paddy Power brands are actually very recreationally focused.
Typically something like the Paddy Power brand, you'd be seeing customers spending sort of GBP 10 a week or the Sky Bet brand. That's what I mean by that, it's a recreational punter. I think those customers clearly the extent to which we can ensure they avail of our tools, we'll encourage them to do so. If we ever get any sniff of them having any problems, we'll force them to do so. We don't have specific targets. It's something that we're sort of thoughtful about, particularly around difference of age profiles of people. We will continue to evolve and use data to help us assess how best to position ourselves. Jonathan, do you want to pick up on the-
In terms of cross-sell rates, I know that DK referred to a sort of 50% general cross-sell rate in their Q4 disclosure. We'd be seeing something very similar to that across our business. No discernible difference at all in those cross-sell rates.
Thank you very much. Sorry, just to follow up on the safe gambling point, Peter. You're saying to anyone that's not recreational has already signed up to SG measures or the SG tools of some sort in the U.K.?
Look, we've got very extensive checks on customers, whether that's source of funds, there's lots of enhanced diligence we do on higher staking customers and I'd be surprised if, for the customers who we haven't had those checks. Ultimately, I think it's important that there are some backstops in place to make sure we capture any customers who are spending too much, and that's, as you know, the third part of our affordability Play Well. There may be some exceptions, but we will learn from those as we pick them up through the third part of our affordability Play Well.
Brilliant. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Your next question is coming from Simon Davies of Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Morning, guys. Firstly, obviously you reported a very strong start to the year. Can you give a rough view as to how much of that is down to abnormal gross win margins? That's my first.
Do you have any more questions, Simon?
Yeah. Could you also give a feel for market share in Michigan, how that's performing and how you see that as a benchmark in terms of market share on newly opening states? In terms of the strong start, it's fair to say that the majority of this is driven by customer growth, again, continuing on from Q4, and we talked about some of the enhanced investment we have put into the business in specific areas to drive customer growth. You should expect that the majority of that comes from that recreational customer growth. There is also a smaller element which is down to results.
I'm not going to comment too specifically on results on a seven-week period, but the majority of it is down to customer growth. Great. The market share number? I won't comment on specific market shares on a state-by-state basis, but I'd say we're very pleased with our opening position in Michigan. We've only traded there recently, but the business is doing really well. Great, thanks.
Thank you. Your next question is coming from Richard Cooper of Numis. Please go ahead.
Hi. Morning. Two questions from me, both from the U.S., please. I think on the presentation, you were talking about how you wanted to improve from podium positions to gold medal positions, and particularly in the U.S. Given you've got 40% share in sports betting and 20% share in iGaming at the moment, what do you consider to be these leading market shares which you'll need to keep in order to keep that position? I think in the past you've mentioned that you expect some of those market shares to fall back a little bit. The second question is, I was wondering whether you can give any color around differences of customer spending behaviors across different states where you're entering, in terms of spend per head and duration on your app and that type of thing. Any color on any differences would be great. Thank you.
Hi, Richard. Look, I'm pleased that someone watched the presentation. I thought it might have just been my mum. Look, it is true, we are refining our ambition in the U.S. from wanting to have a podium position to being on that top slot, the gold medal. We have got that at the moment. Let's be really clear, we are number one in the U.S., and I think to have been able to post a year where our revenues were 1.4 times that of our next nearest competitor, in fact we're greater than players two and three combined, gives us a comfortable top step position on the podium or gold medal. Look, and we'd like to stay there. How that evolves in terms of the market shares that we need to have from a sports and gaming perspective, we'll see.
I think, as you know, we've never necessarily targeted an absolute percentage market share figure in either sports or gaming. What we've tried to do is to acquire as much business as we can at a very specific and good CPAs. We think we have a real advantage around the quality of our DFS business for cross-selling, which gives us customer acquisition advantages, and we think the quality of our product is really helping drive improved levels of retention on the business. All those things together with better than expected levels of cross-selling to gaming, have led us to having higher customer values than we anticipated. That gives us the confidence and conviction to keep investing hard in customer acquisition and you can see the results of that with the figures we released around the Crystal Ball.
Jonathan, I don't know whether you want to give some color around the different states. Look, they are all a little bit different with different partners, and that means you get different starting points with them.
Yeah, I think there are a couple of points on that. Obviously, there's different spend rates depending on the products that are on offer, depending on the GDP per state, and obviously some of the wealthier states we're seeing greater spend. I think the one thing we're seeing, I think possibly because there's more marketing dollars going into each state, is an acceleration of the speed of uptake. Actually in the early states, it's much slower than certainly what we've seen in the most recent states of Virginia and Michigan. I think the adoption curve is getting steeper, and we intend to be there at the start and investing aggressively to build those leading positions.
I think it's fair to say, when we first came out with the numbers, with a market share of around 40% in sports betting, we said, I think two years ago, we expect this to fall back. I think we said the same thing a year ago. Look, we'll hold on as long as we can to this position, but we just want to be ahead of the next competitor. I think just coming back, sorry, to the previous question, in Michigan, I think we are number one with about 28% of handle, just to come back on that one. Look, I think we're very pleased where we are. It's a state-by-state battle, and we'll pick and choose our fights very carefully and make sure that overall we try and remain number one in that market.
Great. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Richard.
Thank you. Just to remind people on the telephone, if you wish to ask a question, please key star one on your keypad. That's star one on your keypad. Your next question is coming from the line of Joe Thomas of HSBC. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Two questions, please, on the regulatory side of things. One is Germany and the mention that you make about the potential turnover tax there. I just wanted to understand if that had any sort of mitigating actions in it and what mitigating actions might look like in response to such taxes, were they imposed be they Germany or frankly, elsewhere. The second thing was just mindful again of this affordability issue. I'm just wondering if there's anything you can help us with in terms of the skew of sports betting customers and sports betting towards the particularly higher spending elements. In the industry, gaming is skewed towards high spending elements. I'm just wondering to what extent that's also reflected in sports.
Okay, Joe. Jonathan, do you want to take Joe's first?
Yeah, in terms of Germany, there's a range of actions we need to take. First of all, we'll continue our lobbying efforts in advance of the decisions around, I think 1st of July timing. We're not overly hopeful that we can change this because obviously the tax is greater than the revenue generated. We need to be very careful in understanding exactly how this is defined when it's put into legislation to really understand precisely what the tax relates to. We also need to look very carefully at the different products which we have within our portfolio, the different poker products we've got for tournaments versus just the live games. Obviously then consider whether there's ways to mitigate that. The issue, I think, Joe, becomes where we've got an offshore competitor who will offer greater value to competitors.
Any of our mitigating actions will have to be put into that context and I think we already see some shift in player activity when one looks at Google searches offshore and we would expect that to grow reasonably exponentially as if this tax were to come in.
Joe, look, in terms of your sort of questions around affordability and the skew, we clearly with Paddy Power and Sky Bet have the two market leaders from a recreational perspective in the U.K. from a sports betting perspective, which we think sets us up really well in the U.K. market. We're really pleased with the way in which those businesses continue to take share in 2020. Indeed, you just need to look at what happened with the customers who are migrating from retail to online. These are customers who are habitual pretty small staking customers. We do have 5% of the shops with the Paddy Power brand, but we believe we captured 40% of that business when those customers went online and we think the better value, things like generosity that we offer those customers will keep them on our platform even when shops reopen.
Yeah, I think we are a very recreational business. It's true in the U.K. and as it is in Australia with our Sportsbet business. I think that's an important area of focus for us to keep growing those average monthly players and that's why we shared the figures with you and why we're so pleased with the performance that we saw in last year. As Jonathan shared with you, that's what's driving this year's performance as well.
Okay, great.
Thank you. Your next question is coming from James Wheatcroft of Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Good morning to you both. Given the scale and scope of the U.S. business, what prospects are there perhaps potentially for a dual listing in the U.S.? Are there any circumstances when you would consider spinning out the FanDuel business, Firstly? Secondly, in terms of U.K. regulation, do you have any thoughts on the sort of direction of travel and maybe the timetable for the current review, please?
Yeah. Hi, James. Look, in terms of that, your last question, the point around the timetable in the U.K., we're all aware of what the government's published timetable is. I don't know whether the sort of ongoing COVID pandemic will potentially sort of derail this or not. We're preparing to submit all of our evidence to them and yeah, I think we're really pleased with the approach that the government seems to be taking around this evidence-led approach and we'll do everything we can to engage with them and share with them the insights that we get from what's frankly a very good ability to sort of review what's going on across the U.K. market. In terms of the U.S., look as you say, the scale and scope of our U.S. business is very impressive.
We believe we have the premium asset in the U.S. market. We're very proud of that. We've worked hard over the last few years to build out that capability. We are number one in America. There's not many British businesses that can state that. Yeah, I think, look, the way in which we've been able to build out those capabilities in America is by really leveraging a lot of our group capabilities to support America. It's not just the funding that we've been able to give to the team in FanDuel, which has obviously been a very important component of our ability to drive customer acquisition hard.
Hundreds of our colleagues from around the world have helped support and build out and develop the FanDuel business, whether that's with expertise from a sports betting from a marketing standpoint, or the fact that we're sort of using our global risk and trading capability, which has got sort of 650 people pricing product globally, which is a very important component of why we have the best product in America. I think the other point I'd also highlight is, the Americans are leveraging our Global Betting Platform, which is a very important aspect of our strategy. The fact that we have many of our divisions using the same platform, which allows us to sort of share development across the group, but at the same time also push decision making down close to the customer end, I think is really important for us.
Very helpful. Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question is coming from the line of Kiranjot Grewal of Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Hi. Morning. Just two questions from me. Firstly, could we get a little bit more color on the performance of the other U.S. brands from the Fox and the TVG and how they've done over 2020? How valuable has that cross-sell been between the brands? Secondly, Australia's performing incredibly well despite fewer lockdown restrictions. Should we be thinking of more resilient performance in Australia versus that was being guided towards the end of 2020? Thank you.
Yeah, look, I commented on FOX earlier in terms of how pleased we are with the way in which we've acquired so many customers onto the Super 6 platform. I think that's been a very important component to that business and will set up that business well for the future is to have nearly 4.5 million actives on Super 6 is tremendous. Look, the TVG business has performed well during the course of the year. We've benefited from the shift of a lot of business from retail to online. That's helped grow that business very successfully. We're really pleased with the market share performance of that business. It's not yet integrated fully into the FanDuel ecosystem. As and when it is, I think we believe that we'll get some contiguous cross-selling benefits from it. At the moment, that's more sort of tangential.
In Australia, you're right to highlight the fact that they've come out of this lockdown ahead of the rest of the world, and we're watching very carefully what happens as customers there are able to go back and enjoy some of the sort of channels that they weren't able to previously, most particularly sort of retail. Early evidence seems to be that customers are enjoying the generosity and superior product that they're getting on the Sportsbet business. Undoubtedly, there's going to be some shift in spend away from wagering into other forms of leisure activity. We're really pleased with the way in which the Australian team performed in 2020. To have migrated the [BetEasy] business in less than 90 days is incredible under full lockdown and the way in which the business is currently trading, we're very comfortable with.
The only point to add on FOX Bet is obviously those 4.4 million are spread across the U.S. in a lot of states. We can only mine that base in terms of sports betting in the states in which FOX Bet is live. That restricts the ability to cross-sell at this point. Obviously, it is a great funnel, but it is a relatively long-term funnel.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question is coming from Christine Xu of RBC. Please go ahead.
Hi. Yes, good morning, guys. I have a couple of questions on the U.S. as well, if I may. Firstly, you mentioned in the presentation that you're refining your state opening playbook, so I just wondered if that's changed at all recently, any surprises or learnings from recent openings, or is it mostly, you alluded earlier to the quicker adoption in later states. Is it mostly that, or is there anything else as well? My second question is just regarding the 1.8 times retention rate in the U.S. versus the U.K. I suppose as the market matures and other players probably improve their product, do you think that there are any structural reasons why U.S. consumers might be stickier in the longer term than European counterparts? I guess the players are referring to more outside FanDuel specific positives in terms of keeping customers engaged. Thank you.
Morning, Christine. Look, in terms of your point about refining the, or the reference you made to refining state opening, look, we think we're getting better at it. The more we practice, the better we get. Whether that's with opportunities to try and pre-register customers, or make sure that we have all the right sort of local influencers and partners signed up to make a splash when we go live. Those are all things which are important components of our strategy. Clearly, we're not going to give away too many of our trade secrets, but we think that as time has gone by, we've got better and better at launching live in states.
In fact, the fact that we own our platform end-to-end allows us to offer differential opportunities and deals for customers and some of the Spread the L ove campaigns and things have been very successful for us as time's gone by in new state openings.
Obviously the only thing to add there is we are looking at making improvements to our product and platform over 2021. We'd expect to be migrated across from IGT onto the Global Betting Platform by the start of the next NFL season, which will give us greater depth of markets, greater resilience, greater speed for the customers. On top of a new account and wallet, which was launched in 2020, we think that'll set us up to hopefully be able to prosecute our advantage in terms of product on the sports betting side. Peter's referred to some improvements that we'll be making on the casino side.
Look, in terms of the differential performance we see from a retention perspective, the market's pretty well competed already. I don't think there's anyone who's operating in America who hasn't gone out aggressively and said they want to take a big market share and that people are throwing a lot of promotional generosity around. It is well competed. I think the one major difference in the U.S. compared with what we see in a lot of markets in Europe is the number of hoops and hurdles you have to get through from a registration perspective. People are having to supply their social security details, which we think could lead to people having a smaller number, sort of active customers having a smaller number of products than we see in other markets.
That may be one of the things that's helping improve and drive retention rates. I think the biggest impact actually is that we've got the best product in the market. What we've seen time and time again, whether that's with our business in Sky Bet or Sportsbet or the changes we've seen in Paddy Power, indeed the investments putting into PokerStars, is you've got to have the best product in the market. We think we've got the best product in the market with FanDuel. The same game parlay product is pretty unique in the market, certainly the way it's integrated. We've got the best breadth and depth of products. We're now operating two states and a full end-to-end tech stack, which gives us much bigger resilience and advantages compared to using third parties.
We think all those things are important components to continue to drive the retention rates as high as they are.
Brilliant. Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question is coming from Ivor Jones of Peel Hunt. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning. I just wanted to ask about the implications for the Exchange of what you said about the international business taking PokerStars as its principal brand. Obviously, Exchange didn't grow nearly as strongly as sports in the second half of last year. Is this a legacy product now in runoff globally to be overtaken by fixed odds betting? How important is the international part of that and the ex U.K. part of that? Secondly, is it possible to have a gold medal position in Australia if Flutter doesn't own Tabcorp wagering business? What are the implications for the group if a more capable international business does own that Tabcorp business in the future? Thank you.
Yeah, morning, Ivor. Look, it's a good question around the impact on the Exchange. There are some sort of technical reasons why the growth is a bit slower in the second half of the year. The fact that we are focusing on the PokerStars brand in international markets doesn't mean that we are not going to continue to push Betfair where it's appropriate to do so. I think we referenced in the presentation that whether that's Latin America or Spain, the Betfair business has good traction and we'll continue to use it there. I see no reason why we can't continue to invest into the Exchange business, and it's something that we are doing right now, and there's some enhancements that are due to be launched to improve the quality of the products on the Exchange, which frankly has lagged behind a little bit.
I think if we actually stripped out some of the switch offs we'd undertaken in the Exchange in prior year, the underlying performance was actually quite good in the second half of the year. I certainly wouldn't characterize the Exchange as a sort of sunset product. It's something which we know is very important and we're investing in it and would like to continue to see that business grow. Look, in Australia we started out as the challenger. The business has gone from strength to strength year after year. We've continued to grow incredibly well. We offer a brilliant experience. We've got a fantastic brand. Customers seem to continue to enjoy betting with Sportsbet. Look, gold medals are important to us and having that sort of top position on the podium.
I can't comment on what may or may not happen to the Tabcorp in Australia. We're really pleased with the way that Australia or Sportsbet performed last year for us in 2020. I think the team did a terrific job in execution. I think to have done that integration in less than 90 days when everyone was working from home, I think was astounding, particularly with all the product enhancements that they delivered for the sports betting customers, the introduction of streaming and things. Look, I'm really pleased with where we are in Australia and we're investing hard to keep that business growing. Jon, I don't know whether you got anything to add on either of those?
No.
Okay.
Thank you.
All right. Well, look, thank you very much, everybody. Unfortunately, we are sort of coming up against it now from a time perspective. Very much appreciate all your questions. Sorry we were having to do this on the phone yet again, at some point we'll see you in 3D hopefully in the summer. Thank you all very much. Bye to all.