On a mission to become the next Romanian Unicorn — an interview with Andrei Popa, Director of Business Intelligence at Superbet.
Superbet is the largest sports betting operator in Romania, with offices in the UK, Poland, Austria, Croatia, Serbia, Cyprus, and Malta, awarded 3 years in a row with the The Best Sports Betting Operator in Central and Eastern Europe Trophy.
In 2016 they stepped up the game and launched their online business. The reason? Offering the best in class adrenaline-packed entertainment to the customers. To stay on top of the game, their plans are big — expanding the business in Central and Eastern Europe and increasing their market share.
The Superbet Group is led by an executive team with extensive experience in the field of international gambling. The vision of senior management, combined with the experience gained from coordinating other successful businesses, quickly evolved to what currently is the company with the most pronounced rise in the field of Betting & Gaming in Central and Eastern Europe.
Their vision was recognized by the World’s largest private equity fund, Blackstone Group, and received a strategic investment of 175 million euros!
More insights on their transition and plans are revealed by Andrei Popa, Director of Business Intelligence in the statements below
As the past year has put many companies in the situation of transitioning their business online, Superbet transitioned from a traditional betting company with physical locations to a technology company. “For us, it’s been a process since the start of the Online vertical in 2016 and then the launch of the proprietary Superbet app in 2018. What happened during the Covid period, was an acceleration of an existing trend, with some of our Retail-only customers moving to the Online landscape. At Superbet, we consider the Retail business to be highly important to our strategy focused on Omnichannel, on enabling customers to have the same experience anywhere. If it’s our betting terminals, our app, our slot machines in shops, or our online website, we strive towards a unified experience.” said Andrei Popa, Director of Business Intelligence at Superbet.
In 2021, technology definitely plays an essential role in all companies and Superbet is working on interesting projects to keep up their business worldwide. One of their main goals this year is the launch of their in-house platform in Croatia. Andrei Popa stated about the project that “We are proud of developing a state-of-the-art real-time platform that will enable us to personalize the experience of each customer to the extent of transforming betting into entertainment. Add to that some of the unique features that we launched last year like SuperSocial (social feed of users, share/like/follow/comments bets and profiles) or our stack of free to play (SuperSpin, SuperGame). From a data perspective, we are focusing this year on creating data-for-everyone infrastructure that will enable any data enthusiast to get access, use and play with data in a heartbeat. For Superbet users that rely heavily on reporting and analysis (note. Superbet is using Tableau), we are building a CRM tool focused inwards. Based on the activity of our employees (traffic to reports, usage, click to action, etc) we plan to segment them for personalized newsletters, interviews, alerts. Even create a rating system that will link the effort invested into report and analysis creation to the usage and business implementation. All to become a leading data company in Europe”.
Nevertheless, he also appreciates that the deep tech ecosystem in Romania is vast, having more than 200,000 tech specialists in employment with 1 in 4 being a woman, one of the highest ratios in the EU of women being part of tech. “RO Tech ecosystem is a mix of various companies and people that operate at different levels but with the same goal in mind, technology. There are the big international firms that created technology hubs in Bucharest or Cluj, the well-established Romanian companies that are going through reshaping their technology stack, and the startup scene which is sprinkled with a lot of opportunities but some successful unicorns as well.” he says.
Superbet is planning to become the next Romanian Unicorn in the next 5 years, being in a mission to excite the world and they plan to do that with investments in technology and especially in their people. Their strategy and how they see technology playing a role in this development is that they are “looking to unify the experience of customers between Retail and Online, to continue providing new products and features that will differentiate us versus competitors, to enhance the SuperSocial platform that allows customers to interact, to have the fastest platform in the market and mainly to add data at the core of our business.” as Andrei Popa mentioned.
Find out more on May 13–14, 2021 during Codiax. Tickets on www.codiax.co/tickets.
