00:00:02
rather than just one big shark and every now and then you will lose one uh player to a competitors but then within a few months you might see him come back so it’s always pushing us to be constantly on top uh with product and yeah everything that I mentioned before so um you don’t really get comfy you don’t really get lazy or anything like that we are always driving to be the best casino ever even though I wouldn’t call it that yet but on top of that we are moving towards more in a approachable way

00:00:36
towards the Fiat Market the more let’s say mainstream market and with the product we have I can see that we are light years ahead of a lot of big players out there and most probably it will be a very very good kind of sandbox being in kurasa thanks for joining us thank you can you give a quick introduction uh tell us about your role at at casino 500 um and give a quick overview of what you’re what you’re currently doing all right my name is Christoph Anderson I’m the Chief Operating Officer for 500 I’m 36 years

00:01:09
old originally from Sweden but I’ve been living here in Malta for 11 years during my time in Malta I’ve been solely obviously working with I am in business not some much else to do over here for both providers and operators so as for 500 we are most known for being a crypto casino and I would say that we are crypto first casino but I would hesitate to call it a crypto Casino since we do offer different ways of depositing more as crypto uh we operating under the Coro license uh and we are offering Casino

00:01:43
Sportsbook and uh different other games such as s games and so on yeah with the the like we mentioned before right with the the GDP of Malta being uh coming mostly from gaming what else is there to do besides no not much exactly maybe enjoying the beach the weather but um what does that look like on a day-to-day basic like can you share some insights into your key responsibilities and how you handle them yeah I mean as I said I’m I’m the Chief Operating Officer but since we don’t have commercial officer I tend to cover

00:02:19
most of the commercials especially with our providers and um I mean it can be negotiating with um new providers reot ating contracts uh if we’re going to bring in a payment provider or whatever but beside that I’m heavily involved with the daily basis or the daily tasks in uh in the casino itself such as CRM uh on-site promotions uh releases and uh obviously all the different kind of like relationship between us and the providers uh when I came into this uh company I did have a lot of background in CRM so that’s been

00:03:01
a main focus for me bringing in a new CRM system trying to execute a new different kind of strategies and uh ultimate a lot of things whether if it’s uh just reworking our bonus engine or uh maybe working on a different way of pushing on onsite promotion and what’s currently one of the like what’s currently top of Mind where are you currently working on or what’s the challenge that you’re currently encountering to try and so I mean we have been obviously putting ourselves in

00:03:32
that situation we did go through a lot of changes with the bonus Engine with those changes we had to rework everything CRM wise so we ped everything that’s been automated we have to rework everything and then relaunch it so that is more or less the kind of like the main project now for 2024 uh trying to roll out new different kind of ways of approaching new customers current customers and also inactive Insurance customers so that has been like the main main focus on top of that obviously there are providers coming and going all

00:04:09
the time some providers that were top of the world just like five years ago I mean we you you barely see them anymore and then you can see a few other ones just popping up and suddenly you can see 1 million ggr within just a few days from them so uh you have to be in on top of your game in order to reach out to certain providers that might not have a direct integration with starting to talk with them before they are getting too much air under their wings and want more percentage wise when it comes to the

00:04:39
commercials in 2025 you meant I’m guessing or that was the thing you were working on and yeah as always the switch right yeah yeah yeah and you you you mentioned um already in the crypto space but you don’t like to call yourself because there are other aspects but what are some unique challenges that you face in the managing the operations in in industry yeah I mean obviously when it comes to let’s just call it crypto casinos to make it easy uh when it comes to the crypto Casino audience they are

00:05:10
much more techsavvy much more educated in the field of crypto and so on and with that comes that they constantly compare us with our competitors checking RTP checking uh what kind of promotions we have what kind of UI ux uh what kind of games we have and so and so on and that is a much much harder let’s say a competition comparing to being the mainstream kind of uh Casino where you maybe get let’s say 60 70 or let’s say less techy 40 50 year olds that they you sign up to the casino and they will stay

00:05:47
there regardless if there are lots of bumps on the road they won’t look in different directions and so on and especially with the when you look deeper into for example UK and other more heavily regulated areas where where you have to provide a lot of documentation I mean even you haven’t started thatting so it becomes more of a hurdle to go from one casino to the next casino but when it comes to kurel and combined with crypto you can more or less change Casino like you’re changing your

00:06:16
underwear so why go for the more crowded Market overall like why choose the the crypto side of it I mean overall it’s more of a fast-paced uh market and uh where you can get a lot I mean it’s if we were a poor bad performing Casino we would be struggling but since we have a great product and so on we can see that I mean since I started we’ve been actually taking some shares from our competitors and so on so it’s more of of a pond with a lot of uh piranas if I put like that rather than just one big shark

00:06:51
and every now and then you will lose one uh player to a competitor but then within a few months you might see him come back so it’s always pushing us to be constantly on top uh with product and yeah everything that I mentioned before so um you don’t really get comfy you don’t really get lazy or anything like that we are always driving to be the best casino ever even though I wouldn’t call us that yet but on top of that we are moving towards more in a approachable way towards the Fiat Market

00:07:24
the more let’s say mainstream market and with the product we have I can see that we we are light years ahead of a lot of big players out there and most probably it will be a very very good kind of sandbox being in kurasa and then maybe moving into certain markets and so on so that’s a strategic decision to to start uh transitioning to Fiat so that you target a different audience I mean you you will most probably try to dig as much gold as you can but once the gold is done or it’s not over there in at

00:07:56
that mountain you have to move to the next Mountain uh so uh and I mean we are all about growth where we can see that uh we will get great Roi that won’t suffocate another department or suffocate any other Market we will most probably go for it so what do you think has led to that success because you mentioned once you have struck the goals like it it ends at a certain moment but also you’re winning players from competitors so where do you think that success comes from yeah so uh I mean

00:08:26
I’ve been working in uh mainly in main Spring Casino they have have a certain like set of tools that you’re using some kind of way of doing things everything is more or less never down to one way street all the time you’re going to use Zam you’re going to use this you’re going to use that and so on but when it comes to uh when it comes to crypto it’s more of putting your finger up in the air and see what the feeling is they are super tech heavy they are very very straightforward and so on but they don’t

00:08:57
really have the mainstream side of things so for example coming from a big company uh in crypto before I’m joining 500 I can I could see the same Tendencies they didn’t really work hard with for example CRM that even like a small startup in for example under MJ SJ and so on they are doing first but over here they did barely touch CRM so I believe that was one big uh step in the right direction also when it comes to this side of the business they tend to be less uh out there in the big crowd

00:09:30
meeting up people in at conventions and so on and also they didn’t have any direct uh relationships with the slot providers payment providers of Sportsbook providers everything were going through one aggregator and when you using an aggregator they need to have their share obviously so by cutting cutting the middleman uh we got a lot of uh a lot of De decreases in their fees we did get a much better relationship we could do things that we couldn’t do before so I believe those are the main

00:10:03
things and it also shows in the I mean in the growth of players not only in the on the profit side of things in in the growth of of the amount of players that that that joined the platform over the years you mean on the the retaining side of of keeping players what strategies are you have been most effective for 500 in making keeping loyal and engaged players I believe that we the best way we are doing things right right now compared to our competitors is that we are working very very heavily with CRM

00:10:35
uh take one big competitors I would say the the biggest whale among everyone’s stake they are barely using CRM Meanwhile we’re sending out retention campaigns on a weekly basis most probably one or two Z contains everything in order to entertain the player giving them something back and also being relevant all the time rather than sending out newsletters they obviously want something in order to open up the email which gives us much higher open rates much higher delivery rates much higher uh percentage of

00:11:04
retention rather than expecting someone coming back and depositing without any kind of reason if they kind of got a little bit put off by the casino by maybe losing some money or they maybe tried another casino and so on so CRM is the Golden Nugget I would say especially in the in the crypto space because CRM is I wouldn’t say fraed upon but it’s in some cases it’s even for but I don’t know why H it’s mainly because that they come from a completely different kind of side of the business where they haven’t

00:11:36
even thought about it uhuh so that’s that’s the Golden Nugget sort of no that’s one of the the silver BBS that led to to the success one of them obviously let’s keep it at that and we already touched touched it so maybe it’s already answered but I’m still going to ask it and and you then you tell me but you’re trying to make the transition to a more traditional Casino what will be different once you open that and and how are you approaching opening that or starting starting with that obviously

00:12:06
going from Cel into let’s say more regulated market that comes with everything that’s boring but needs to be done such as a lot of more compliance a lot of more shcks everything from yeah kyc to anti I mean everyone is you in antimon laundering and so on but this is on a completely different level obviously uh where you down and have to look at everything from source of wealth once they reach a certain threshold uh down to knowing the size of underwear a player has more or less so it will

00:12:41
obviously be some extra hurdles a little bit harder to bring over people like in in the crypto space where people are going back and forth but once we retain some players it will be easier or uh acquire some players and they keep depositing it will be easier to retain them rather than in the crypto space so it has it ups and downs but uh it will most probably include that we have to hire a lot of more people uh in order to make sure that we can fulfill all the requirements of each uh and every local

00:13:14
uh licensing or license holder makes sense where do you see that the the crypto space going but like because it has been sort of a trend for years now and also Bitcoin is at almost I think it’s almost at an alltime high or as a alltime high right now so where where do you see it going in in the future yeah I mean I believe crypto peaked at over 100k doll uh a few weeks ago now it’s closer to 90k so it’s still I mean on a very very high high level that we haven’t seen before I would say that

00:13:49
there has been some bumps on the road just looking at the in the US where they wanted to have a certain Department having look at all the crypto and so on and it’s scared a lot of people off now it seems to have taken a different turn with the change of presedent yeah so I mean from a crypto perspective it does look look still bright but then you can also see that for example what kurasa was let’s say 5 10 years ago is completely different what we are seeing kurasa right now they they want to tight

00:14:24
in a lot of things they don’t want to be seen or frowned upon they um want to be seen as a serious uh lenser with some extra shacks and so on and it might scare some some players away it doesn’t really scare the casino themselves if they are serious and want to want to apply or want to uh follow all the rules but obviously we have some players that want the fast-paced environment they don’t want to submit a lot of papers just in order to start playing and so on so it’s kind of like a double edge sword

00:14:59
but overall I I’m actually very very positive for the future right well we we’ll see where it goes and what other Trends do you see shaping the future for the I gaming so I mean all in all if you turn back the clock maybe 10 years ago everyone was sitting and playing they were doing 100 spins putting it on the a of spins or they were just trying to like Chase the bonuses and so on but right now what you can see that especially on the younger audience I wouldn’t say just the crypto space that

00:15:27
people want very very fast wins uh so people are buying bonuses they’re going with like these crash Gams where they just put in money and they know they will get an either instant loss or an instant return they don’t really like the grinding as you saw it before when it comes to sports book I can’t really see that we have seen any particular Trends what I can see that Esports betting has obviously increased a lot uh but otherwise it has more or less been the same so there you don’t see any new

00:16:01
trend shaping the Future No I mean mainly mainly in uh mainly in the casino uh in the way of uh betting and uh wanting the fast returns and fast wins so Tik Tok is uh destroying our attention span yeah and obviously you you you have the a much much bigger platform for all the screamers all the influencers and so on that uh tend to I mean in in a good way present casinos and so so on but also in a bad way bring in vulnerable players that might not even or shouldn’t be playing because um they might end up in a bad place yeah

00:16:40
right well let’s end it with that thank you for joining us yeah thank you