CEO Franz Gerhart interviewed by iNTERGAMINGi

iNTERGAMINGi Jonny Whitfield: Could you give us a refresher on the advantages of vyking’s igaming platform offering? How do you reflect on your past 12 months of operations and key successes / challenges overcome?

vyking Franz Gerhart:
The design of our technology has been driven by the desire to facilitate an end-to-end service to operators regardless of their presence or scale. Our business model is based on revenue share, hence we only earn if our operators earn and in an industry as tech savvy and competitive as the iGaming industry, this clearly requires top notch in-house products & real-time analytics as well as integrations to best-in-class vendors.

I would argue that vyking API’s deliver the highest degree of freedom in the industry, empowering operators to build their own, custom and proprietary technology on top of our framework. This saves them from costly dependency situations, enterprise deadlock and allows responding to unforeseen market events efficiently and within a timely fashion.

In the past year we have doubled down on the statement of never becoming a bottleneck to our clients. Reverse integrations, being the ability for operators or content suppliers to independently integrate content into the vyking platform, are now way beyond PoC with more than five independent integrations done by our clients’ teams.

Moreover, the reference implementation to our frontend has been reworked from the ground up, providing a repository of robust and highly scalable components, gearing us up for the Euro 2024.

iNTERGAMINGi Jonny Whitfield: Could you explain how your Frontend Code works for clients and customers? How does its array of features help push partners towards their business goals? Could you share any success stories from Frontend Code in recent months or years and the impact of these on your wider business?

vyking Franz Gerhart:
When you look back 10 years, the industry used technologies that would build websites on their servers, making it impossible for clients to deploy their own team for major frontend changes.

To date, not much changed and it is still easy to spot the manufacturer of a product regardless of the brand simply by its looks as customizations boundaries are within adjusting colours and logos.

We have taken a radically different approach back in 2017, exposing a stateful real-time interface that anyone can build a fully decentralized casino or betting site around within a matter of days. Granted that the industry has its complexity, we are providing operators with the source code of our reference implementation, so they don’t need to reinvent every wheel.

The benefits here are major. Our operators don’t need to adhere to our corporate roadmap and the features we are interested in. They can use dedicated teams to localize the product to their needs and cater to their userbase without compromise.

iNTERGAMINGi Jonny Whitfield: Could you explain how vyking’s Payment Hub works and how it helps connect customers to over 300 different payment methods around the world?

vyking Franz Gerhart:
This is just another sample on the end-to-end nature of our services. Payments are the foundation to growth and so we are connecting operators to processing channels.

With the furtherance of regulation, operators licensed outside tier-1 jurisdictions are seeing many avenues closing. Native access to transactional EVM based blockchains such as Tron, Polygon or the Binance smart chain are inevitable. vyking has just implemented support to their crypto currencies and tokens together with the required compliance and risk management tools for operators to accept and administer crypto payments that match their risk appetite without a watchdog interfering with their business decisions.

iNTERGAMINGi Jonny Whitfield: Could you explain your Affiliate Center and how it operates? How does this amplify your business?

vyking Franz Gerhart:
It actually amplifies our operators’ business. We are using here a mix of in-house systems for agents and land-based kiosk as well as market leading software such as MyAffiliates or NetRefer.

Chances are that any traffic which is not organic will actually be channelled through by referrals. Having access to the industries finest will ensure that affiliates are finding familiar and trusted tools to focus on driving traffic instead of exploring the unknown.

iNTERGAMINGi Jonny Whitfield: How do you see igaming platforms and trends in platforms changing as 2024 progresses and 2025 comes around? What challenges will the sector face and how will vyking and the wider industry help tackle these challenges?

vyking Franz Gerhart:
iGaming platforms are essentially real-time data brokers between consumers & content suppliers. Providing relevant content, i.e. the right game to the right consumer at the right time, is paramount.

That said, the biggest challenge in the area of large language models is well understanding the sheer amount of data that is being generated on a daily basis and help maximize user experience & retention whilst minimizing fraud.

There are a few companies out there specialized in making good use of our data feeds but for the sake of their operators, iGaming platforms must not merely rely on 3rd party intelligence and hence heavily invest in their ability to draw valuable conclusions from real-time data in real-time.

In short, data science is the 2024-2025 discipline we have to excel in for our operators to maintain profitability.

iNTERGAMINGi Jonny Whitfield: Could you explain which markets vyking has its eyes on for partnerships / expansion of products in 2024 and why? From a more general perspective, can you pick out any markets you think the industry should be looking into and why?

vyking Franz Gerhart:
Brazil has huge potential and with the market becoming regulated, a lot of opportunities arise. vyking has been exhibiting at SBC Rio de Janeiro in March 2024 to identify potential partners and showcase its products to the key players.

Our bonus engine for instance is a very valuable piece of software also to those running existing operations on other platforms or in-house solutions, taking their offerings to the next level.

iNTERGAMINGi Jonny Whitfield: If you could pinpoint the one overarching ambition for vyking in the platforms sector in 2024, what would it be? How will the company set about achieving this aim?

vyking Franz Gerhart:
Maximizing partners' income via real-time data brokerage between consumers & content suppliers, by delivering B2B connector technology & industry knowledge.

We are a 100% committed to grow our team and invest in the best people in the field of software development, mathematics and statistics. Applying someone else’s AI just ain’t cutting it.