“Comtrade will soon announce new partnerships”

What was the outcome from Comtrade's participation at ICE 2015?

The ICE experience this year has exceeded our expectations. The number of visitors, especially the important ones for us, has definitely improved from 2014 and we got a very positive feedback from all our visitors.

Which product was the star at Comtrade's booth?

We wanted to present the new convergent offering that unifies player experience across land based, online and mobile channels and we managed to do that very well so that most of our clients were impressed with our demonstrations.

What are the firm’s business targets for the year?

In 2015 we hope to open new markets for our key products. They both have comprehensive support for new requirements in regulated markets like central monitoring and responsible gaming, so they are suited for new markets where regulators define stricter frameworks for new operators. Since we were able to integrate support for both worlds together – online/mobile and casino/retail - we are targeting operators that manage a complete portfolio of channels and products and might target different regulated markets across the globe͘.

How are you planning to expand your business worlwide?

Comtrade Gaming is growing steadily and consistently over the last 5 years. Both in the portfolio of our products and number and size of our clients. We don't add many new clients, but we try very hard to help existing ones to grow their business and to efficiently launch new products with new clients. Most of our new business is a result of good experience that existing clients had with us and we want to keep this positive trend in the future.

We made a strategic decision to open new markets via partnerships where we are searching for companies that complement our technology focus. We already have some partnerships agreed upon and will make some further official anouncements in 2015. 

As an independent technology provider that offers open platforms we also enable operators to freely choose their content providers.

Bearing in mind that the gaming industry is constantly evolving...as it deals with changing economics and regulatory pressures, among other factors, what changes would you implement to make it more efficient?

Standardisation on technology side would definitely help many operators to more pro-actively modernise their product portfolio and innovate by introducing new features more quickly. Land-based industry is one step ahead in this respect but recent anouncement of first online gaming standard by Gaming Standards Association is a good promise that also online industry will follow. Comtrade Gaming is an active contributor to these standards and we are helping also many vendors, operators and regulators to implement and deploy standards-based solutions.

How important is it to bring about new legislation to regulate gaming? How does this impact on revenue?

Regulation is very important especially around responsible gaming and general monitoring of operators. This might seem as a an activity that would reduce revenue, but we believe that in the long run stricter responsible gaming procedures would have a positive efect and proper regulatory activities would help regulated operators by eliminating their grey market competition.