Promoted feature: Hero Gaming's secret weapon for great onboarding

EGR Intel (EGR): Igaming and sports betting companies rely on multiple third-party services such as payments, fraud solutions, and so on. Why was it important for you to seek a partner to facilitate your registration process?

Georg Westin (GW): Before we partnered up with Checkin.com, we built our own registration process in-house. For over six years, we kept discussing internally, how we should start carrying out A/B tests on our registration flow, however, we never got around to it, as there were too many other priorities and new ideas in the pipeline.

We knew we could implement an A/B testing framework, but we also needed a small team put in place focusing completely on registrations which involve testing new features and optimising the integration. Our biggest concern was that since we operate in multi-markets we also had to integrate third-party tools to assist our registration flow with the data verification tools we needed. We realised it is not our core or something we should focus on, so the possibility of using Checkin.com’s framework was the smartest thing to do for us.

EGR: What would you say are the main challenges facing a registration process today?

GW: One of the main challenges of doing online business within an industry as fast and as competitive as igaming is that you constantly need to be on your toes, ready to act — fast. As an operator, you have to stop and think.

EGR: What are the main factors driving your financial engine?

Customer Lifetime Value and Customer Acquisition play important roles. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) relies on new features we roll out and our game offering while Customer Acquisition is where we drill down to the details of our acquisition funnel. It includes everything to do with our marketing strategies, brand building but especially online conversion rates, new visits, and new registrations.

We found that the Checkin.com framework is really good at converting new visits from the point of registration. It’s great to have a partner like Checkin.com that helps us in such a key feature, while also contributing to minimising the cost of customer acquisition.

EGR: What are the important standards that you follow with partners when accessing new markets?

Definitely a very good communication flow. We feel we have good communication between our teams and Checkin.com’s team. We constantly use Slack groups to discuss problems, new opportunities, discuss a new brand, or potentially entering a new market. The Checkin.com team is always supporting us and up for a new challenge whether it is building a new product or entering a new market.

When we launched a new brand in Japan, we realised we needed the expertise in-house but also with the third-party suppliers we work with.

We understood quite early on that we can’t sit here in Europe and think we understand how the Japanese market works. So, we quickly recruited people that were familiar with the Japanese market, had the Japanese mindset and culture. On the other hand, Checkin.com facilitated us with a localised strategy for our sign-up flow that our Japanese players felt familiar with. This is how and where we want to continue to head, both in terms of knowledge and also in partnering up with third-party vendors. Partnering up with third-party vendors that have the capability of understanding the key details of each market is key for us.

EGR: You’re using Pay N Play on some brands and Checkin.com’s sign-up flow on some other brands. What differentiates between both registrations?

GW: This has very much to do with Sweden. People in Sweden are born using their personal number offline, online, and as required by authorities. With this said and with the early digital adaptation, Swedish people trust online services and appreciate the ease of things, that is why we adapted Pay N Play on some of our brands targeting Sweden. This is not the case in all countries. So, in order to keep our legacy of simple, fast and engaging registrations, we adapted the Checkin.com flow in other countries where signing-up is not as straightforward.

EGR: Is compliance a key factor in the registration process?

GW: Compliance is one part. The other part is fraud. Fraud is an extremely important part where we prevent people from creating fake or double accounts. Checkin.com flows handle this very well with the use of a third-party supplier. The Checkin.com framework understands when a player is already registered and stops the registration; preventing us from having duplicate accounts in the system. It also ensures that the data entered by the player is correct which helps us understand the player and who we are dealing with.

EGR: How easy was it to get up and running?

GW: The developers are very happy with the way the integration was handled by Checkin.com. Mostly, because it is very well documented and the integration was fast and easy to follow through. It’s pretty much putting a piece of code and deciding which markets you want your flow to be enabled in. Of course, when entering a new market or when releasing a new product or feature time to market is key, so building a fast registration process is very important. I remember, there was a time where we built a brand and built our own registration process. The building part of the registration took the most amount of time and effort, as we wanted advanced technology with all the error handlings. We learned from that experience and that is why we use Checkin.com on most of our brands. Checkin.com cut the registration work efforts in 1/10 of the time.

EGR: How do you see the future of third-party relationships? What is expected from suppliers?

GW: All of our gaming operators are highly dependent on third-party suppliers. From gaming suppliers to registration suppliers, hosting, payments, and so forth. We have a close collaboration and relationship with most of our suppliers and we trust that they are experts in their field. It would be stupid on our part to try and replicate their technology in-house when they are doing so well at it. We believe that the third-party suppliers we work with are best in class, and also deliver the best service to us while being transparent and involving us in their process instead of just having a ‘relationship’ There is a trust that both parties are working on creating the best experience for the player.

Checkin.com applies advanced technologies to make it enjoyable for users to sign up for new services online. The company is on a mission to fix one of the truly broken processes of the web. The solution allows users to control data while making great services grow faster. Checkin.com evaluates current forms, sets up a workflow, and provides front-end integration to keep services up and running within a day. The company was founded in January 2017 by Kristoffer Cassel and Alexey Kuznetsov. It is based in Stockholm, Sweden.

Georg Westin, Hero Gaming

Georg Westin is the largest owner and the founder of Hero Gaming, a company with roots in gamification of the gambling world and runs multiple successful brands such as Casino Heroes, Speedy Spel, Boom Casino, and CasiTabi. Westin was previously co-founder of Casumo and CTO at Betsson and Betsafe. He is also a successful investor in digital start-ups via his company Maxify.