Scaling Sports Betting Platform for Global Digital Expansion 

Background 

William Hill is one of the world’s leading sports betting and gaming companies. With over 80 years of heritage and a leading brand, combined with rapidly growing digital expertise and an ever-larger global presence. William Hill needed to create a strong platform from which to grow. By having these foundations in place, their ambition is to build a digitally-led, internationally diverse gambling company of scale.    

To do this William Hill focused on three strategic priorities: 1.Customer, 2.Team, 3.Execution.    

This approach is enabling William Hill to win with the customer and build digital capability across their geographically diverse teams and execute on their commitments. They do this by leveraging their global platform, seeking operational efficiencies, and by delivering sustainable and profitable revenue growth.   

This of course requires people with relevant experience and exceptional talent. 

Client 

William Hill is a British gambling company headquartered in London, England. Its product offering includes sports betting, online casino, online poker, and online bingo. The business is split into two divisions, UK and International. UK operations are conducted from London, Leeds, and Gibraltar, while its international business operates from its hub in Malta. 

Challenge 

To support the strategic priorities listed above, William Hill required exceptional talent and they needed this talent exceptionally fast!   

The client needed experienced developers to work on their in-house ‘Unity’ platform. The roadmap had strict timelines and commitments and execution was key.   

They needed people who have substantial experience in developing high volume, low latency programs for mission-critical systems, that could deliver high availability and performance.   

The first challenge for the team was to deliver on the promise of the first MVP release that was required to receive approval from the MGA (Malta Gaming Authority licensees). The focus of this release was on compliance and account journeys.   

The next key milestone was to launch in the first market (Nordics) with Norway first, followed by Peru, and then North Macedonia. 

Solution 

Team members were a part of 2 different major divisions of the client’s online betting portal: the general payments platform and the sportsbook, and helped to achieve success in each of these two divisions.    

The “Unity” betting platform was successfully launched in the first 3 countries: Norway, North Macedonia, and Peru.    

After the successful launch of the sports betting solution, the team participated in the preparation of the product for the next round of certifications and was closely cooperating with product and UX teams on the next improved version of the sportsbook. In addition, team members were involved in customer support to ensure the satisfaction rate of the customer was kept at the highest level. 

Results 

The first member of the team was onboarded within 1 week   

Team members were key members of the overall delivery team and actively helped with growing the teams (active in recruiting and onboarding other team members) as well as knowledge sharing.