Tech for the People — An Interview with Betfair on Leveraging the Power of the Community
Betfair is one of the companies that truly encourage innovation and works hard to achieve it, as they embrace a wide range of programming languages and are distinctly present in the tech community.
Betfair Romania Development is one of our Gold partners for Codiax 2019.
Coming up next, you can get insights on how Betfair looks for value and supports it by putting people first from Paula Tibre, the General Manager of the Paddy Power Betfair Cluj Office and member of the Flutter Entertainment technology leadership team.
“Together with the leadership team in Cluj, with a focus on values, strategic thinking and people enabled Betfair Romania Development to grow to more than 900 employees, which makes it the biggest technology centre in the Flutter Group, recognized for its excellence in various technology, operational and commercial areas.”
Betfair is widely known for its community-driven initiatives; supporting Codiax and Techsylvania being among the projects to benefit from your continuous support. Why us?
Communities create a sense of belonging, of being part of something bigger than us and being connected to others like-minded. That sense of belonging, growth and being understood inspires us, gives us strength and motivation to believe in a bigger future.
Betfair Romania is such a community, of passionate professionals thinking about the customers, their experience when using our products and the culture where we can enjoy every day when we come to work. It is because of their hard work, boldness and innovative spirits, that we have managed to always reinvent our industry, think, get answers and quickly adapt to the latest technologies and ways of working.
Similarly, the same passionate professionals think of giving back to the people which need it the most, to the town which has been the place where we studied and found a home and maybe the future of our children. And this is not a one-off initiative — it’s leadership because they are true leaders. We call them our CSR Heroes. It was because of their strong belief in doing more and doing better so that NGOs like Beard Brothers, Tasuleasa Social, Life Education for all, initiatives like O masă caldă, Charity Treat Sale, Scripor Alphabet, Shoe Box, organizations like The Box — Barbell Club, Cluj Crusaders and more (way more) got the much-needed support to deliver their projects that shape the world we want to live in.
Codiax and Techsylvania have put Cluj Napoca on the map of the IT Conferences and create such a community contributing to the future of the city, IT industry and people from Cluj. From this point of view, supporting Codiax and Techsylvania is, in fact, our way of supporting visionary ideas from our technology pioneers and of those from all around the world. The more diverse the professional backgrounds, stories, experiences — the better. Having global technology leaders in the spotlight during two events that put our community on the international tech map truly gets us inspired.
The company is also a keen supporter of deep tech startups, one of them being Alpha Hub. What can you tell us about your program?
We were talking about communities. Alpha Hub is a hands-down example of how we leverage the power of people in developing innovative solutions that bring value to the customer experience. Launched in 2018 with a focus on responsible gambling technologies development, Alpha Hub upscaled into an ecosystem of startup, academic and corporate components.
Our goal was to create this virtual collaborative space and to get the startups community closer to our corporate environment, by enabling an easy way for their technologies to complete our products and internal innovation efforts. We’ve made a commitment to explore these new ideas, new companies, new people as we thrive amid change.
How does Betfair embrace innovation?
We are a big company, not only in Romania but all over the world with 8000employees across 16 offices. Sometimes big companies tend to become slow, repetitive and less original. In this company, however, there is never a dull moment — everything moves fast, evolves and surprises even the ones that have been here for a long time.
That is because are widely known to do things differently and to never stop creating new and exciting ways for our customers to bet on what they love.
In Paddy Power Betfair, innovation is an outcome of culture. We have recently developed a new culture plan that stands for innovation in its early stages. It revolves around curiosity. It will be our challenge to drive curiosity in people and to fuse the mindset into day-to-day activities. A lot of shared experiences, ideas and good practices come as a result of a common ambition in offering our employees, not regular jobs, but journeys of self-growth, by encouraging them to learn, collaborate and test their ideas.
On the other hand, in order to build brands that our customers love, is crucial for us to ensure a culture pillar focused exactly on listening to our customer and constantly harness their feedback. This is how innovation takes shape — by tackling each matter from every point of view, think bold solutions and experiment in order to achieve outcomes and key-results carefully defined at the beginning of each process. All these, together with a diverse and inclusive environment is what makes for the growth mindset of our people. We value everyone’s input, experience and background, which creates a stronger, better organization for all of us, implicitly innovative.
