Kambi: Meeting bet builder’s immense popularity with effective risk management
Bet builders are now the core product in an operators’ arsenal, according to Kambi, but operators should be aware of a raft of factors to consider for player engagement and to benefit from effective retention.
In the B2B sportsbook supplier’s latest White Paper, Kambi examined its own experience of developing bet builders, providing insights offered by Product Strategy Lead David MacTavish and Director of Risk Management David Arnold.
Examining the history of bet builders, originating in the UK market in the mid-2000s as ‘request a bet’ offerings, Kambi observed that the products are a “cornerstone of a long-term sports betting trend” by which players demand more control.
The demand has required sportsbooks to “reconstruct algorithms and legacy models to accommodate evolving trends in player preferences and behaviours”.
“The popularity from day one was immense, and engagement has continued to grow year on year, with little sign of this growth slowing down,” MacTavish said.
“With this in mind, it quickly became clear that this was a product segment which really interested bettors on the Kambi network, and we set about improving the soccer bet builder further while adding more sports and leagues.”
MacTavish further noted that, with the US market continuing to grow – with Kambi establishing itself as lead technology supplier – bet builders appear to be a ‘natural fit’, as the firm works to customise its product offering for North America’s distinct wagering audiences.
Looking at the stats, 45% of NFL bettors during the 2021/22 season placed a bet builder. Meanwhile, 24% of wagers on the league as a whole and 50% on the Super Bowl were placed via bet builders, whilst 42% of punts featured selections from more than one game.
Kambi is not alone in its assessment that bet builders are one of the most important products for the modern operator – this sentiment was shared by a panel of senior sportsbook figures at the SBC Summit Barcelona last month.
However, offering the product is not without its challenge, the company’s white paper asserted, with MacTavish outlining guidelines for a bet builder to find success with punters.
“The most popular markets must be combinable, such as player props, while reasonable margin levels are also of significant importance, with overly high margin restricting long-term engagement and enjoyment of those wagers,” he explained.
“Furthermore, it must be smoothly integrated into the wider sportsbook UX. Too many clicks to create combinations or discrepancies in the odds created will only serve to foster frustration and harm the prospect of long-term customer retention.”
Building on this, Arnold examined the risk management aspects of a bet builder – like any sportsbook or igaming product, the key is finding the ‘sweet spot’ between maximising profitability and minimising risk.
This requires sophisticated automated models analysing bet requests to evaluate bettors’ profitability expectations, working alongside liability aggregation models with ‘intelligent monitoring capabilities’ and risk mitigation mechanisms to combat ‘extreme liability growth’.
He concluded: “With a bet builder there is added complexity when forecasting the profitability of a bet request and the impact that bet request has on liability growth.
“This is primarily due to the addition of a correlation that now exists between selections which is not seen in other bets.”
To read Kambi’s bet builder White Paper in full, click HERE
Source: SBC News
