Homegrown Sun Bets project paves way for future markets. The biggest global venture in Tabcorp’s 22-year history was never going to be easy.
In late 2015, the gambling giant announced a partnership with publisher News UK to launch a new online wagering and gaming business in the UK and Ireland. The Sun Bets online bookmaker combines Tabcorp’s wagering expertise with News UK’s customer base and media assets.
Tabcorp’s role in the deal was to provide the wagering systems, services, and customer interface, and manage the combined online wagering, bingo, and gaming business.
Its IT team was faced with creating a wagering platform that could service a market three times the size of Australia while managing the demands of two large companies with their own culture and ways of working.
(Tabcorp brought its digital operations back in the house in 2011 after deciding it wasn’t getting the agility and responsiveness it needed from its outsourced technology partner.)
A technology team of 188 was pulled together under the leadership of CIO Kim Wenn, and the decision made to develop bespoke software that could take Tabcorp’s existing capability to the UK market.
The $20 million Sun Bets project utilities Tabcorp’s existing fixed odds and customer wallet technology, alongside its digital offerings, as well as integrated Playtech Casino software for bingo and gaming content, and UK-centric services like a UK payment gateway solution to localise the platform.
One small slice of digital transformation to come, I lead the project from concept through to delivery. This involved many tissue session for the team to understand the complexities of how TAB works, how Percentages are found and how bets and spread are design to the customer, on top of the understanding over 12 different persona types that had been clearly indicated from the data collected so far.
This was a massive challenge to understand what the teams could design and how far we could push our thinking to help solve issues with customers that are not digital literate. As you can see from the concept design we took the idea of making any screen a personal screen that a user could interact with and make a bet.
