“We are a 21st century gaming supplier company, so we only operate networked devices”

What are you showing here at FADJA show?
We are showing our server-based slots, SBG slots on the Machete cabinets and a couple of other cabinets, the Blaze and the Storm. There’s also a multi-game cabinet for venues in Colombia, street locations, arcades and casinos, with about 15 games on it at the moment, there will be over 20 games by the end of this year, slots games, free-spin games, and casino games like roulettes and Colombian poker games. It is important to say that it is fully server-based, so we add a new game every 4 to 6 weeks. We add one new game and we are constantly innovating the machine and the experience for the player. 

We are also launching here our Super Suerte feature, which is a value-based feature that allows the player to get max lines. But max lines for half the minimum stake that we would normally apply. So if you play a max line you effectively get a two for one when you play. We think it will work very well for the Colombian player because it is a time on device player in the arcades; he likes to spend not too much money but have 45 minutes-an hour of play. So we want to have a full entertainment experience of the game and therefore enjoy the max lines experience. 

How was the feedback from visitors?
It’s been very positive. We’ve already got probably 500 to 600 of these machines deployed; and we have orders for some thousands of units in Colombia, so we are gonna see a lot of these products in Colombia, and the feedback is very strong. We spent probably 18 months tuning and customizing the games to the Colombian player; we’ve done a lot of market research down here. So we hope that we really have a portfolio of games that really appeal to the player and to the operator. 

Which games are the ones that have more acceptances in the Andean market?
Today the Arcades. We have 300 arcades with Codere. And then we have a bunch of other smaller customers in the arcades section. 

How important are other countries in the region, like Peru or Argentina, for the company?
We haven’t done anything in Peru or Argentina. We have been pushing into Mexico for the last 18 months or so, and we are starting to get some real attraction in Mexico, so we are excited about it. I’m trying to be quite focused; I mean we are one of the two biggest companies in the UK in machines; we are one of the three biggest companies in Italy, we are the largest supplier in all of Europe, server-based, VLTs and SBG slots. But Latin America is a new market for us, so I’m trying not to do five or six countries. We are focusing on Colombia and Mexico at the moment. And we’ll be pushing to other markets as time goes on. We are focused on server-based technologies so we do not operate a single analogue traditional slot machine. We only do Cloud and SBG slots and VLTs. We only do digital connected devices. We are a 21st century gaming supplier company, so no traditional slot machines, only networked devices.

If we look at what’s happening in Colombia, there are two main changes. Firstly, you’ve got the likelyhood of regulation coming out any minute, which is gonna mandate that all the machines are connected. So every machine you buy here from Inspired is automatically connected, with all the international technical standards and, by definition, connected to a central data center so that we can send reports to the government about the level of income, the level of play, you can also give the operators much richer information than they would get from a traditional machine, about what’s working and what’s not working on their machines. 

Do operators, for example, in the Colombian market, understand those changes, those kinds of products?
I think it is a good question. I think some of the operators understand very well that there’s new regulation coming that will require them to have connected machines. I think fully server-based and all the benefits that it brings are new to Colombia. I mean, in the UK, it happened in the last decade, if you look 10 years ago, we had a completely traditional analogue market. Now, almost all the market is server-based and all of the most profitable things for the market for the operator are server-based. The same has been happening in Italy the last three years. There are still a lot of analogue machines, but even they are connected and by far the highest income machines are this fully server-based VLTs. And that’s been driven by government requirements as is happening here in Colombia. So there are big benefits for the government but also for the operator. 

The operator makes a lot more money from a server-based machine. But I think the second big change, if you look at Colombian machines state, (except in the best casinos), if you look at the arcades in the street-market, the machines are very old, and the games change very infrequently. You move to server-based and all of a sudden you’ve got brand new games, the latest technology and a really exciting experience for the player. I love visiting Colombia. It is a wonderful country and a very sophisticated country which is modernizing very fast. You see people with the latest mobile phones, with all the latest technology, the latest fashion, and the economy is growing 8 to 10 % a year, so Why should we have a gaming industry with 15 to 20 year-old machines?

In particular for this region, how secure is the system?
The system is highly secure. It is much better than the traditional analogue system for security. With an analogue system, an old poker machine for example, typically you get one pretty dump set of data per day, so you know how much cash-in cash-out the machine took in a few bits of other data. On these machines, we are tracking them in real time, so every second we know what’s happening on the machine. Every player pressed, every single game played, every single win, every type of game played, every stake level, we have all that information. We can send an alert to the cage or to the central system. Every interference with the machine, every tiny event, every engineer keyturn, everything that happens in the machine, we are tracking and monitoring centrally and the operator can manage in the venue or centrally. It brings so much higher level of visibility for the operator and equally and a higher level of visibility for the regulator. And we believe what the regulator will be saying in Colombia is the level of tracks on the license duty you have to pay will correlate to how connected you are and how much information you give. So our machines will give much more information than analogue machines.

So, I mean, Inspired is also very well-known for our virtual sports, and we operate almost a 100% of the virtual sports worldwide and generating income. Our virtual sports operate billions of dollars worth of bets every year though in betting shops, in lottery shops, in casinos, online and on mobile phones. And we have them in 30,000 venues around the world now. We are adding 10,000 to 12,000 venues in the UK, rolling out up to 20,000 venues in Italy at the moment and about 10,000 venues in 30 other countries around the world. And in virtual sports we have virtual horse racing, greyhound racing, soccer, car racing, tennis and cycling and so on, and we believe the virtual sports will be shortly regulated for Colombia. It is a big new income stream. 

If you operate a lottery venue or a small arcade, typically virtual sports will add hundreds to a couple of hundred dollars a day in new cash income to your venue every day, 50 to 100 thousand dollars of new money to your venue. But it doesn’t exist today. We’ve seen that in 30 countries; in the UK, in Italy, in China, in Uganda, in Cyprus, everywhere. It is a very successful product. People like to bet on sports, but there aren’t enough real sports, so from 8 in the morning until 10 pm at night we will run virtual sports every 3 minutes. It is a novelty; it brings excitement to the venue. So we are really excited about that. In Colombia is a big opportunity for operators to make a lot more money. 

And then also we have the leading electronic casino roulette products in the UK, in which have about half the market now, and we’ve started to push that product internationally. It is very successful in Asia as well, which is a big table gaming market, and we are showing it here in Colombia for the first time. We are optimistic about it in Colombia, because the roulette products in casino floors are increasing in Colombia. And that’s a premium casino product.