Superbet

Betting on growth

Over the past five years Superbet has experienced significant growth, with revenues increasing by 10 times during this period. Keen to sustain this trend, Superbet is on a mission to expand its operations and excite more customers with its competitive, personalized betting and gaming products.

As a data-driven organization, Superbet is always looking for new ways to enhance its data analysis capabilities to support strategic growth. Andrei Popa, Director of Business Intelligence at Superbet, explains: “Rapid data analysis is the engine powering our business, it drives everything from transaction processing and fraud prevention to developing personalized services. To sustain our competitive position in the market, it’s vital that we can collect, ingest and analyze data to generate rapid insights.”

Initially, Superbet developed its analytics capabilities using an SQL engine and multiple sophisticated spreadsheets. While this way of working enabled the company to provide strong services to its customers, creating key reports was complex, time-consuming, and offered only descriptive and diagnostic analytics capabilities.

Andrei Popa continues: “We wanted to take our analytics capabilities to the next level by developing the ability to carry out predictive and prescriptive analyses, which would enable us to anticipate how our business might respond to market forces and test various potential scenarios for optimizing business performance. What’s more, we recognized that by automating key analytics task we could greatly increase our agility, productivity, and efficiency.”

Superbet identified two use cases in which improved analytics capabilities could help to enhance business performance. First, the company aimed to identify its best and worst customers with better accuracy; with its best customers being those who generate the most value per user, and its worst customers including people engaging in fraudulent activities. Second, the company looked to build a deeper understanding of the performance of each of its stores, by correlating internal performance data with key geospatial information: a move that would help the company to catalogue the formula for a successful store and replicate this across its entire branch network.

Vertica (now part of OpenText™) has been a real game-changer for us. Since deploying the solution, we’ve been able to identify suspicious players that are potentially committing fraud with an accuracy level of over 90 percent on first bet placed. As a result, we can greatly reduce the risk that these players pose to our business.

Next-generation analytics

To evolve its analytics capabilities, Superbet decided to build a new data warehouse using OpenText™ Vertica™—empowering the company to create a powerful, centralized platform for all analytics activities.

“We targeted an analytics database that would be intuitive and easy to use for our analysts while also providing powerful and flexible tools,” says Andrei Popa. “Initially, we ran two data warehouses; one powered by Amazon Redshift and the other by Vertica (now part of OpenText™).

It quickly became clear that Vertica (now part of OpenText™) was the fastest database in the world for our needs, in terms of reporting, analy tics and data science, so selecting this solution as our main database was the obvious choice. The fact that Vertica (now part of Open Text™) seamlessly integrates with a wide range of industry-leading proprietary and open source solutions was another huge point in its favor.”

Sitting at the heart of Superbet’s analytics infrastructure, the OpenText solution is hosted in five nodes on Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure. Superbet has architected OpenText to ingest data from Google Analytics and from its BigQuery data warehouse while also integrating with the Apache Airflow workflow management platform and Apache Kafka framework management solution. To help analysts identify trends in its data, Superbet has integrated the solution with Tableau business intelligence software.

Superbet worked with btProvider, the only OpenText™ Vertica Gold Partner in Romania, to deploy its data warehousing solution. Alexandru Savencu, CEO of btProvider, comments: “The Vertica (now part of OpenText™) solution not only meets Superbet’s immediate needs but also opens up new use cases around machine learning, geospatial analytics, and more. Beyond the Vertica (now part of OpenText™) technology, a key success factor in steering Superbet on its data-driven journey has been the open internal communication and innovation within the company.”

Preventing fraud and rewarding value

With OpenText powering its analytics activities, Superbet is now much more capable of spotting and preventing fraud, while also rewarding high-value players.

“Vertica (now part of OpenText™) has been a real game-changer for us,” says Andrei Popa. “Since deploying the solution, we’ve been able to identify suspicious players that are potentially committing fraud with an accuracy level of over 90 percent on first bet placed. As a result, we can greatly reduce the risk that these players pose to our business and stop them in their tracks before they cause serious damage.”

He continues: “Vertica (now part of OpenText™) has also helped us to spot high-value players with a 75 percent accuracy rate after only two weeks of activity. Being able to understand which customers hold the potential to add true value to Superbet helps us to develop more personalized services designed to nurture those customer relationships.”

OpenText’s capability for revealing user behavior at a granular level is an important feature for Superbet, since paying close attention to customers is a major part of their value proposition.

To ensure responsive customer support, Superbet recently developed a customer service chatbot which now handles up to 50 percent of customer queries. Today, the chatbot automatically handles more than 150,000 customer interactions and is deployed across the company’s store network—freeing customer support workers to spend more time developing stronger customer relationships. The chatbot AI is self-learning. It stores all it’s interactions in OpenText™, and learns how to respond better in the future from those.

Data-driven operations

By developing predictive and prescriptive analytics capabilities with Vertica Analytics Platfrom, Superbet can identify with a high degree of accuracy the recipe for a successful betting shop—helping the company make better informed decisions on store management.

“By combining geospatial data, metrics collected in store and player demographic data, we can build a highly detailed picture of the performance of each of our branches,” explains Andrei Popa. “For instance, we found that stores located near public transport hubs typically enjoy a much higher footfall, which in turn increases the value of the store. With insights like this we can make smarter strategic growth decisions when opening new locations and increasing the profitability of existing stores.”

Superbet has also improved the efficiency of transaction processing and Know-Your-Client (KYC) checks with OpenText, contributing to a more responsive and satisfying customer experience.

“Today, over 86 percent of online Superbet payments are automatically approved by a set of rules and algorithms that we created using Vertica (now part of OpenText™),” comments Andrei Popa. “By automating payments in this way we can ensure that transactions happen as fast as possible, giving the customer more time to play their favorite games instead of managing their account.”

He adds: “Similarly, 83 percent of our KYC activities are now automated. With approximately 500,000 new users signing up for our services each year, running KYC checks manually would be incredibly time-consuming and could potentially put new players off. With Vertica (now part of OpenText™), we can run these checks quickly while upholding the highest industry standards.”

Looking ahead, Superbet plans to develop more personalization features by harnessing customer behavior data to generate individually tailored recommendations for each player based on their activity.

“We’re excited to take the next step in our analytics journey with Vertica (now part of OpenText™) and will look to use the solution to develop new and innovative products. Ultimately, this will help us keep our customers interested in our services and strengthen our competitive position in the European gaming sector.”

Could Vertica (now part of OpenText™) help your organization become a data-driven company just like Superbet? Find out by signing up for a free trial of OpenText™ Vertica Community Edition and start unlocking the full potential of your data.

It quickly became clear that Vertica (now part of OpenText™) was the fastest database in the world for our needs, in terms of reporting, analytics and data science,so selecting this solution as our main database was the obvious choice.