As widely anticipated, the FIFA Russia 2018 World Cup was undoubtedly the biggest betting event of last year, as bookmakers flooded the general public with a range of market incentives and sign-up offers.
The huge volume in new customer registrations, garnered through constant day-to-day promotions, delivered bookmakers a scale that can only be produced by the hype and furor of World Cup markets.
For bookmakers ‘peak scale’ indicates ‘peak traffic’, however, during Russia 2018 were betting incumbents prepared to match likely ‘fraud-spike’ demands, which could to a nasty post-summer World Cup hungover.
Paul Marcantonio, Head of UK and Western Europe for ECOMMPAY, spoke to SBC on traffic management how, as a betting stakeholder, ECOMMPAY had to adapt to a mass transactions demands during the tournament.
He said: “From our perspective, it was fantastic. We made sure that we prepared ourselves for the massive influx.
“You have to be there to make sure that nothing falls over, because if it falls over during a critical time, your business is in serious trouble.
“So it was about making sure that we were there prepared, not being complacent, and having all sorts of structures and elements in place to make sure that we could deliver as 100% as possible, in terms of a service for our operators.”
Sharing Russia 2018 perspectives, Matt Harrod, Vice President of Processing.com, spoke of further new GDPR legislation being implemented before the World Cup – enforcing further consumer protections on messaging, communications and contacts, which betting incumbents had to abide by.
Harrod explained: “The GDPR regulation gave those operators a reason to talk to those customers again.
“As opposed to letting those clients drop off the list at some point this year with this, they could actually engage actively at that point which also helped with existing customer base.”
Despite the positives such an event brings, there is always the flip side especially with issues of fraudulence that comes with new customers.
As Jens Bader, Co-founder of MuchBetter, explains: “We’ve seen a big spike in fraud, unfortunately. New customers coming in with no history or no pattern.
“You don’t want to deny business, so you get some bad business in as well.
“The World Cup has been helping us as a payment provider to achieve a new high on where we are, and getting new customers introduced to our service.
“On the other side, we had to do quite some clean-up afterwards to actually make sure we keep hanging on to the good business and shutting down the bad business.”
