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Field Notes from SBC Summit North America
Last Week, Brian Wyman, SVP of Operations & Data Analytics, connected with colleagues and clients at SBC Summit North America. Following is an edited excerpt from the “Field Notes” Wyman shared on LinkedIn outlining themes he identified across conversations and content during the event.
Greetings from the floor of one of my favorite events of the year! The SBC Summit North America has felt every bit as vibrant and energetic as in years past, and everyone I’ve come across seems both optimistic about the industry’s future and incredibly busy as opportunities abound…
As always, these notes offer a quick reflection, after a few focused days, on the major themes – some old, some new – that I encountered across conversations throughout the show.
Emerging Markets and Tribal Partnerships
This was certainly a two-way street with several friends and colleagues from tribal country joining to learn about and discuss the evolving sports betting market and the iCasino market-to-be. The floor was abuzz about Kentucky’s surprise sports betting authorization (and whether all of those skins even make sense), while talk continued about other potential jurisdictions, including Missouri and Texas (which most believe will peter out in the short term), Minnesota (pushing to find stakeholder consensus for a bipartisan sports bill still in play), and even North Carolina (VLTs). From the operator perspective, tribes offer a wealth of partnership and market access opportunities for both sports wagering and online casinos, but fragmentation in the tribal market and cultural differences -- between tribes and commercial operators as well as from tribal community to tribal community – make a focused business development approach a major challenge.
Payments Challenges and Solutions
When asking, “What are you trying to accomplish across these few days,” a simple “payments,” was often the answer. Payments as a space has challenges and probably warrants a full discussion of its own. At the end of the day, ensuring quick and compliant, low-cost transactions from a meaningfully diverse set of banks across several jurisdictions is difficult, and we’re now seeing startups coming in to tackle these challenges one by one. As an example, vendors at SBC were selling automated reconciliation and reporting, fraud detection, AML, KYC, and cryptocurrency management, while operators shopping them were seeking these solutions in a low-cost, low-risk, and frictionless manner…
Read the complete article, including detail on Recession Impacts, M&A Incentives, and Math & Analytics Trends here.
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