An interview with Adrian Bailey, Managing Director with Pariplay
By Mihnea Popescu-Grisogono
Taking a proactive approach to upcoming and new challenges on the horizon, and building solutions that enable partners to overcome new obstacles with the least amount of trouble and costs.
➤ Please tell us about the history of Pariplay.
Pariplay began its humble beginnings back in 2011 as a B2C focused company with a Player Account Management system. In 2013, Pariplay was acquired by Majesco Entertainment USA and had its first major integration with 888. Then, in 2014, Pariplay management purchased back the company and began its new strategic direction when Adrian Bailey joined as the managing director.
By 2015, Pariplay had shifted to be a comprehensive B2B iGaming solutions provider. The development team was expanded, who then started growing the games portfolio and building the company’s proprietary game aggregation solution called FUSION. As more and more operators came onboard and various strategic partnerships were established, Pariplay started gaining traction and recognition in the industry. This led to rapid expansion with more and more 3rd party game developers and vendors adding their game portfolios to FUSION. With this growth came the demand for more products and solutions, which led to the opening of a large R&D Center in Bulgaria in 2017. FUSION started to evolve into a turnkey solution for operators, with a complete back-office suite of tools, analytics and more. At the same time game development was scaled up to enlarge the Pariplay portfolio of games.
By 2018, Pariplay had more than 100 partners onboard and boasted more than 2000+ games available through FUSION, plus held B2B gaming license for 5 major jurisdictions. In 2019, Pariplay opened an additional development office in India. In the same year, Pariplay was acquired by Aspire Global as a strategic deal that would boost bo th companies.
Today, Pariplay has over 70 staff members with offices in Malta, Gibraltar, Bulgaria and India.
➤ What makes you different in comparison with other similar companies?
What sets Pariplay apart from our competitors are three key components. The first and foremost is our focus on the value-add to drive up ROI. Everything we do is centred around ROI for our partners. Whether it’s a new innovative slot feature with the aim of engaging players for longer to increase revenues or building features into our solutions that improve efficiency and reduce costs, it is all with the aim to provide the operator with better value. The second component is innovation. At the core of Pariplay is a strong culture of innovation and how can we transform challenges that operators face to create solutions that set us apart. Some examples of this are FUSION GRT (Gaming Regulation Technology) which enables operators to enter newly-regulated markets in a fraction of the time and for substantially lower costs. Another excellent example of our innovation is our FUSION Tournaments tool that is a first of its kind in the industry that allows operators to launch and manage leaderboards with any games irrespective of the game vendor. The final element that sets us apart is our flexibility. Our solutions are designed and tested to work with 60+ vendors out-the-box. We understand that operators utilize multiple vendors and technologies, and our solutions allow them to unify all of this. What encapsulates all of this, is our commitment to service and ensuring our partners enjoy exceptional support and service.
➤ Which are your strongest points?
Our key strength is our ability to build mutually beneficial, value-add partnerships. We don’t believe in selling generic “boxed products”, but instead take the time to understand each client’s needs and environments.
The iGaming industry is constantly evolving and presenting new challenges, especially for operators. We take a proactive approach to upcoming and new challenges on the horizon, and we build solutions that enable our partners to overcome new obstacles with the least amount of trouble and costs. By being proactive, we are able to improve efficiency and once again increase ROI for our client’s.
Another key strength as briefly mentioned earlier, is our culture of innovation and creativity.
Our team members are not only recruited based on their skills but on their ability to bring fresh, creative and innovative ideas to the table. We encourage “out of the box” thinking that brings cutting-edge concepts to life. The reality is we are working in a highly competitive industry and know that to excel we have to be ahead of our competitors and it’s clear from our exceptional growth in recent years that our strategies are paying off.
➤ Which are your best selling products?
When it comes to our in-house developed slots we have seen exceptional success and uptake by operators and in turn their players, especially with our games like Dragons of the North, Wolf Riches, Joker Joker and others. Our dev teams have pulled out all the stops in recent years to bring interesting themes and features to the market. We have also invested substantially in optimizing the player UX to give our games advantage over the competitors, especially when it comes to mobile gaming.
When it comes to the back-office, FUSION is our flagship product, but it is important to note that FUSION is way more than just game aggregation and gives our clients a full suite of back-office technologies to run their entire business.
Another solution which we launched in 2016 is called Ignite Studio Development Program. Ignite is a solution for independent game development studios with great ideas, looking to enter the market, expand their product offering and wanting to reach a wider audience, but lacking in licenses and resources to enable them to do so.
Ignite offers a turnkey, streamlined solution that includes access to our game development frameworks, tested and approved gaming algorithms, infrastructure and licensing. Ignite partners also gain immediate global distribution through our FUSION distribution network. Ignite supports any coding language and allows for games to be deve loped much quicker and cheaper. We already have some fantastic studios that are benefiting from Ignite such as Ruby Play, Skillzz Gaming, BallyWulff and our latest partner, Playlogics.
➤ Which are the market you are in?
Pariplay is certified in the regulated markets of the UK, Sweden, Bulgaria, Italy, Portugal, Denmark and Romania. We also hold B2B licenses in the UK, Malta, Gibraltar, Romania, & New Jersey. We expect to be live in Spain shortly and have other key regulated markets firmly in our sights for 2020.
Romania is proving to be a key market for us, and we recently concluded a deal with Baumbet, one of the leading casino providers in Romania, that is both involved in land-based and online casino. In addition, our games are also available in Netbet.ro, with more deals in the pipeline. All PariPlay games are already translated and localized into 20 languages, including for those markets mentioned, so our clients can enter these markets much faster and seamlessly with relevant content.
➤ Which are the plans for the near future? And for the long run?
We have three strategic goals for 2020:
1) Continue to expand in regulated markets
2) Development of truly innovative and engaging games
3) Continue to invest in back office tools to deliver operator ROI for our Fusion aggregation platform across all our third parties
Regulation is one of the primary drivers for us, so wherever new regions become regulated, we will continue making sure we are ready for it and in turn allowing our partners to enter the markets quickly and easily.
Recently, we have been awarded a provisional license for New Jersey (USA). Another key market that we are watching closely to see where the regulation is headed, in Germany, as this is a key market for most operators.
Besides the regulation, our medium to long term goals are to grow our games portfolio substantially, and we have already started ramping up our game development to ensure a minimum of 2 new games per month.
Finally, our focus for aggregation is to continue to develop a broad suite of acquisition and retention tools for our operator base across all third party games in our content portfolio, which will in turn drive their ROI, building on the incredible feedback and success of our recently launched Tournaments tool.
➤ Which is your opinion about the gaming after the covid-19 pandemic? What will be changed?
First we already see a huge push from all land based based gaming companies be they operators or machine manufacturers to try move online as soon as possible. The covid situation has highlighted the risk of having your entire business either online or offline.
So, I believe going forward we will see 2 things: one is the online companies trying to get some foothold land-based and then the opposite for land-based companies.
➤ What will happen with traditional gambling?
Traditional land-based casinos will always remain, and I believe it will come back strong, especially in areas where its more about the resort. People search for entertainment and gambling is only part of that experience.
