Q&A with Matej Nemec, Senior Vice President, Commercial for EMEA and Latam, Bragg Gaming Group

Article by : Maryna Mykhailiuta Sep 18, 2024

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About Bragg Gaming Group

Matej Nemec: Bragg is a publicly-listed, globally diversified iGaming content and technology solutions provider with offices in a number of countries and with a broad and diverse employee base. Our offices include Toronto, Ljubljana, Malta, Chennai, London and Las Vegas, with our operations spread across these spaces. We develop and operate iGaming Casino content for a wide range of operator partners within the industry, as well as a full suite of turnkey technology solutions such as the Bragg HUB product delivery platform, a Player Account Management (PAM) solution, Remote Games Server (RGS) technology, Fuze ™ marketing toolset as well as managed and operational services. For me, there is no one area which has a greater focus, however we are known in the online gambling industry for delivering custom iGaming solutions for online casino, sports betting and lottery operators in regulated markets.

Matej Nemec: As a content and technology supplier, we’re constantly looking to expand our partnerships to new customers as well as adding additional strands to our existing partnerships. We have a substantial pipeline of partnership agreements to be signed as well as ones that have been signed that we will be announcing over the next few months and years , so it’s exciting times to be a part of Bragg, to be sure.

Matej Nemec: Diversification is something that we always consider as we look to better cater to the needs and demands of our operator partners and the players utilizing our content through those operators. We’ll be diversifying our content offering throughout the next decade, as well as adding new technologies as the industry evolves and as consumer habits change. As to the specific types of diversification, I can’t really say, as I don’t have a crystal ball, but it will certainly include new game types, styles and mechanics which will have to align with new technology. For a business like ours it’s imperative to stay on top of trends and incorporate them in our core offering. New players like new things, in social media, Facebook used to be dominant, today its Tik Tok. Our business is no different, new players want new types and styles of games and we cater to that demand.

Matej Nemec: There were a lot of things to be proud of in the first half of 2024, we signed and went live with PAM deals with Kingsbet in the Czech Republic, as well as Hard Rock Casino in the Netherlands (as part of their launch), a deal which was our sixth PAM client in one of our most important markets. We’ve also significantly ramped up our U.S. push, entering new markets and making new commercial agreements with the biggest names in the market like FanDuel, Caesars, Bet365 and Golden Nugget. In addition, we’ve reinforced our business with a number of new hires in key positions, personnel additions which we hope will deliver growth across the business.

Matej Nemec: Ideally to build on the progress we have made during the first half of 2024, further growing our business, especially in our in-house RGS content development studios, Atomic Slot Lab and Indigo Magic, actions we’ve taken to better cater to the needs of our partners. As with any business, the main drivers of our financial performance are the strength of our offering, a diversified portfolio of operational markets, a pipeline of partnerships and new business, as well as the potential for new growth to occur.

Business Strategy

Matej Nemec: Our content strategy is largely the same from year to year, and comes from one central axiom, to create game changing experiences for players through innovative mechanics, design, graphics, audio and gameplay elements. At the same time, we also are proactive in addressing player preference changes, industry trends as well as new technological developments and verticals which become available. We are a customer oriented business, and another big part of this is soliciting feedback from players and casino managers alike, feedback which we use to improve our overall offering, and something which will play a huge part in next year’s plans.

This is an approach we employ consistently across all of our operational regulated markets and in all of our partnerships with our operator and game development partners. We’ll also look to align our content, game styles and mechanics to the latest trends which are appealing to players. In 2025, we’re launching a number of new mechanics across our slots portfolio, as well as adding new studios as partners and new content to our remote games server (RGS).

Matej Nemec: We’re obviously focused on the largest markets for iGaming, i.e. Europe and North America. Within this, we’ve enjoyed considerable success in the Netherlands where our products process around a third of the total wagering in the market and where we have many valued partners. We’ve also expanded into Italy, the Czech Republic and a number of other regulated markets. In the U.S. we’ve extensive partnerships with some of the biggest operators in the market, including the likes of FanDuel, Caesars, BetMGM and DraftKings, expanding our offering with them in the biggest iGaming markets like New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

We’re always looking for new markets in which we can expand our business, and are already expanding into the Latin American market, where we’ve received a B2B license in Peru and are actively pursuing partnerships with aspiring operators in the soon to be regulated market of Brazil. It’s quite simple really, wherever the regulation of iGaming and sports betting is prevalent, Bragg will be involved in some way.

Matej Nemec: Regulatory changes are inherent and necessary as markets mature, and we’ve seen this in markets like the UK, Spain and the Netherlands, where new regulations have been introduced as players’ habits and market dynamics have become clearer over time. As a supplier with many partnerships across regulated markets, our partners depend on our ability to maintain the compliance of our products with all current regulations and respond to regulatory changes quickly and in a way that preserves their compliance and competitive advantage.

Speaking from experience, you can probably expect to see the introduction of more things like deposit limits, restrictions on advertising, as well as changes to individual elements of things like slots design, as we’ve seen in the UK, to ensure that players are gambling in a way that is safe and fun. In the Netherlands, which is a huge market for Bragg we’ve seen the introduction of the Responsible Gaming Policy Rule, which imposes things like deposit limits but also requires operators to be stricter on the real time monitoring of players by operators. This includes barring against excessive participation, framed as depositing repeatedly, betting continuously and gambling for extended hours at night. As a supplier, Bragg’s solutions are data driven at all points, and we’re agile enough to adapt our technology to any sort of regulatory changes, as we have here, where we’ve tightened our existing data monitoring to ensure these regulations are met.

Matej Nemec: A lot of our operator partners, particularly in the U.S., have a heritage of land-based slots development and a large catalog of titles that they now want to transition to the online gambling world. Our Las Vegas-based slot studio Wild Streak Gaming has a strong pedigree in this area and has helped many of them to transition successfully. Working with established slots brands with a strong land-based presence, including the likes of King Show Games, Bluberi and Incredible Technologies forms a key part of our North American content strategy. We’ve worked and continue to work with many land based casinos and lotteries to develop online versions of the games that their players enjoy. There’s a lot of areas in which the mechanics of land-based slots can enhance the online experience and vice versa. Transferring these popular and ‘battle-tested’ titles and brands to the online environment carries with it a lot of advantages in terms of player recognition. Updating those titles with newer, popular mechanics and features can attract new groups of players, adding value to not only the land-based brand but also the studio which created/updated the online version of the title. Its a win-win, but it has to be done right. Fortunately, Bragg has considerable experience in dealing with these transitions, starting with Gamomat and working with brands like Sega Sammy, Bluberi and King Show Games today to name a few.

About technology

Matej Nemec: We deliver highly customized and localized content and technology packages which are often very different between customers and jurisdictions, , but each brings something different to the table and each provides a solution to specific obstacles encountered by iGaming operators, be it customer engagement, access to the latest slots titles, managing the player journey in a compliant way and a suite of technology that can underpin any operations. In respect of our Fuze ™ product, its a marketing toolset which uses gamification-based, data driven insights to increase the engagement of players at all stages of the player journey.

Fuze has tools including free rounds, an AI-powered game recommendation system, themified in-game widgets, tournament gaming with realtime leaderboards, quests, flash jackpots and bonus promotions which can be tailored to suit local audiences, something which is particularly useful to those operators targeting new markets. Fuze tools are content agnostic and work across the board, designed to suit every type of player imaginable and without the need for additional integration by the operator utilizing it.
About the user

Matej Nemec: Users change, that is a simple fact of life and something you have to account for as a provider of iGaming solutions. Today’s smartphone savvy players are a world away from the traditional land-based casino gamblers of old. New verticals have entered the thinking of players and vicariously, the market itself which responds to cater for this new demand. Part of our role as a supplier, as I’ve said in previous answers, is to account for these changes with our products but also retain the core elements that players looked for in previous iterations, as well as having those same qualities in our new content. Being aware of these trends is something that we account for, and something that we are able to cater for through the data driven insights provided by many parts of Bragg’s iGaming content and turnkey technology solutions.

Matej Nemec: Bragg’s proprietary content studios (Atomic Slot Lab, Indigo Magic, Wild Streak Gaming) have been working on a number of new slots mechanics, such as Connect&Collect, Pop’nSplit, Cash Tower and these will be deployed in many of our slots titles throughout 2025. We’re also currently working two more new mechanics, but I can’t say any more at this point. In addition, we’re constantly growing the number of games in our portfolio which use these new mechanics every day.

Latest Bragg Group News & Related Pages:

1. Caesars Digital Expands iGaming Partnership With Bragg Gaming
2. Bragg Gaming Expands Operations Through Deal With FanDuel
3. Page with Free Slots from Atomic Slot Lab
4. Page with Free Slots from Indigo Magic