“We’re looking forward to meeting all our ICE-bound friends!” – Exclusive interview with Domenico Mazzola, Commercial Director at Altenar ahead of London’s gaming show.
Altenar has been making a serious name for itself in the past 12 months as one of the industry’s fastest-growing sportsbook providers. We caught up with Domenico Mazzola, Commercial Director at Altenar, ahead of his team’s attendance at ICE London 2022 next week. With some fantastic commercial success across the UK, Europe, and LatAm, Domenico’s certainly got plenty to talk about!
Congratulations on Altenar’s recently announced commercial results for 2021 – what’s been key to powering your platform’s exponential growth?
Thank you, we’ve been working hard to achieve the targets we set ourselves as a company. I believe the key to powering Altenar’s platform growth is the continual driving force of our C-levels to seek change, whether this is adding something new to Altenar’s software or seeking new forms of sports betting entertainment like Esports.
Operators have seen the ease of use and success available to them with our vision – and through Altenar’s fantastic sportsbook, the product delivers the rest. With that, the world opening back up and having expos take place also powers Altenar’s growth and we’ll be attending ICE in London at booth S3-340, so come along and speak to our team of experts, we’re looking forward to meeting all our ICE-bound friends and partners after so long!
Which markets have proven most instrumental to Altenar’s development over the last year? How much of Altenar’s business is geared towards Europe vs the likes of LatAm and Africa?
We are placed around the world, but Europe, LATAM, and the UK have been instrumental to our development – this is because these individual markets require so much from us as a sportsbook provider, from adapting to the customers’ needs to finding and attaining the right licenses to operate, and it’s what’s really established us as one of the best providers out there.
Having access to unique challenges from a country or operating region allows Altenar to be at the top of our game and the forefront of sportsbook technology, and I’m sure that with the excellent development pipeline we have in place, we’re in for an exciting year ahead.
Given your UKGC and existing operations in the UK – how much do you see Europe’s largest betting market influencing Europe’s development in the decade ahead?
Each market is unique and for that reason, we treat each market that way. For instance, one market will prefer a certain type of sports betting to the neighboring market, and it rarely follows a domino effect.
If anything, the largest betting market might influence Europe’s development in terms of greater adoption of or legalization of online gambling, given the revenue intake can be so high and therefore beneficial to countries as a whole.
This means that more European countries could look to operate sports betting in the coming years as the UK houses some of the biggest names in the industry, we’ve learned a lot from deploying our range of products in the UK, and it’s been an invaluable experience that helps hone our strategy worldwide.
Looking to new markets where Altenar has gone live, such as the Netherlands and Bulgaria – which jurisdictions do you currently see as the most untapped across Europe, and indeed LatAm?
I believe that Brazil will be a very large market for Altenar and for Europe, there is an endless supply of jurisdictions that Altenar would love to be involved with, especially as Altenar is witnessing a greater adoption of sports betting across Europe as a whole.
Great things take time, and in Brazil’s case, it certainly has been that! We’ve achieved great success in neighboring markets, and while Brazil is no doubt a unique market on the continent for a multitude of reasons, I’m very confident that our experience puts us in a pole position for really catching local operators’ interest.
Esports, data, and virtuals are a key part of Altenar’s offering – what kind of demographics do you believe your products are appealing to and how do you plan to capture the interest of the next-gen player?
Altenar’s products are appealing to a wide demographic, purely because sports tend to lend themselves to a host of age ranges, backgrounds, and everything in between. It’s one of the most beautiful aspects of sports, so it’s no surprise that the same ethos extends into sports betting.
Esports will be one of the factors in capturing the next-gen player – as it already is doing, simply because it allows for a host of imaginative, creative, and almost fictional gaming that far exceeds the limits of traditional sports betting. For instance, a gamer can bet on the death of a dragon as opposed to a specific player scoring a goal. The scope of the industry is changing just as the player is – and it’s a very exciting time to be part of it.
