Mobile betting critical to the future

Speaking to the publication Tech Week Europe this week, William Hill plc managers stressed the importance of mobile betting to the company’s future success and discussed the opening of the group development centre in Tech City, London.

The company hopes that it will be able to attract the mobile development talent it needs to react to changes in the betting market and continue to expand its digital operations.

William Hill is the UK’s largest bookmaker with 8.6 million customers, but says it cannot be complacent in a competitive market.

The new development centre will allow it to improve and expand its portfolio of online and mobile services, and to increase and retain its customer base.

Andy Lee, the company’s managing director stressed the need for the company to be proactive in the technology environment, whilst CTO Finbarr Joy predicted that the betting company will be challenged in the next few years by new devices and applications such as wearable technology.

He revealed that William Hill’s sports betting app has been downloaded by more than 1.3 million iOS users and generates GBP 23 million in turnover every week.

Lee told Tech Week Europe that William Hill is ‘mobile first’ and says its applications must be the best on the market.

The firm currently has more than 500 IT staff around the world in Leeds, Sydney, Las Vegas, Tel Aviv, and Gibraltar, but says it has arrived in Tech City to tap into a different skill set.

“We did a lot of research, we recognised a lot of places, but we believed the talent pool here was at a level we want to be at,” explains Lee, who says there are currently 20 employees working at the Will Hill centre and he is hoping to double that.

Joy commented that the focus will be on recruiting people in the mobile app industry with transferrable skills, rather than those with experience in the gambling sector.

Whilst betting shops remain a vital part of the William Hill enterprise, the company hopes that there will be more overlap between the digital and physical betting worlds in the near future, with location-specific offers and rewards an example of increased convergence.