hi andrei thanks for joining us today hi tim hi very nice being with you today yeah looking forward to speaking to you about kind of gaming tech company accompanying his goals to start off with though i thought it'd be good to get a little intro from you can you tell us a bit about yourself your background and uh what you do in your current role yeah definitely yeah first of all uh very nice meeting you it's the first time we ever talked so nice speaking to you and i hope that you had a nice weekend yeah thank you so about myself uh well i've spent a couple of good years in the industry this is my eighth which just started uh in 2021 so i've been most of the time with every matrix uh in the in the past seven and a half years i've joined them in 2014 and it all started with some sort of internship in the sales team i was mainly doing affiliate management yeah and then slowly was building up my experience into the the proper sales team if i can say so um so i moved here and there but always inside the company so i switched positions doing sales and account management so it was 100 commercial all the time um most of the time i was in bucharest but then i also decided to uh to try malta for a couple of months and it was a nice experience i mean who doesn't love to live on an island at least their life and then yeah this opportunity came with gaming tech and you know i think the company was was great everything that was presented to me was sustainable feasible i like their project um i think it also gives me a huge opportunity to grow because i you know spend most of the years in sales management and right now i'm uh i switch to commercial director which is a you know part of the big uh of a raise of an impact for myself and i hope that i you know i can bring the same impact uh for the company and help them grow help them develop into this new um project new adventure yeah so this in big lines is what i have been doing lately yeah sure how you found your your time with with the company so far the gaming tech uh i think it was very very nice obviously it's only six weeks yeah so i'm still very very new to this company uh i spent the first week in kiev with uh you know with the rest of the team uh this is where they're based let's say their main hq most of the most of the employees are sitting there although they have a very nice policy of you know pretty much allowing everyone to work remotely um and right now i'm in bucharest now so i i prefer to work from home it's natural um so yeah i managed to meet most of the team they're all very nice people i've been more than welcomed you know i've been involved in in meetings from the very beginning so i really feel like everyone was uh was very warm and um you know it's very very easy to build those kinds of professional relationships inside the company and i can say that maybe with some of the guys i'm already uh friends with so um yeah it's been very nice i'm looking forward to what's up to what's upcoming yeah sure that that that does sound nice and i appreciate you as you say you're very new to the company but from from kind of from what you know so far and obviously what you would have maybe researched kind of uh when getting the job um can you walk us through gaming tech's journey as i understand kind of started in 2013 around then um so it's a quite quite young company but can you kind of walk us through the journey and the history of the brand well yes if you can consider like eight nine years in the industry to be still a young company then yeah okay um seriously yeah not that young yeah not that young they are quite experienced um and they build themselves up you know so they started very very small and now we're looking at the company of more than 200 people yeah and still grown works constantly we have a lot of new job openings which i invite everyone you know to to check out um i think that up until let's say this year they have focused mostly on b2c so this is where their attention went to and pretty much all of their resources and they've done a pretty good job so keeping on growing year after year means that of course they were resourceful and they they've done their uh their jobs pretty well so with me coming to gamingtech it's not the shift in focus but let's say that the company also wants to dedicate itself to the b2b sector so this is where my experience lies in and um i think that they you know that the company realized the importance of going into both spaces because b2c is of course nice also very risky it can be uh very profitable but you know you need to have sort of a backup and i think the future is is with b2b for both gaming tech and you know the providing industry itself yeah for sure can you talk us through the kind of breakdown of the business so obviously you've mentioned b2c and kind of newer to b2b but also in terms of casino and sports betting kind of the verticals you work with of course um so pretty much gamingtech offers the full product suits that you could find in the industry yeah and there's a lot of competition out there but i think that every competitor has its own ups and downs um with gamingtech you would find as i said the full range of products starting with the pam a wallet functionality that we call the gt core um that is pretty much fully developed in-house yeah over the past six um seven years and then um we have we don't have our proprietary sports book um i don't think that's in you know in the future plans but we are cooperating with several names from the industry and so we are aggregating various apis and of course we are capable of building the the front end the ui ux ourselves uh as for casino we are doing what pretty much everyone else out there is doing which is aggregating and adding adding our own idea of gamification yeah to the under the casino platform we also have payments yeah pretty much spread across the world so it's quite a good solution and of course our own affiliate platform affiliate management system if you want to call it like that which is called income partners uh of course there are additional um let's say features third-party tools which are integrated into the platform um which are definitely out there to help both the b2c and the b2b side clients so uh yeah full full product yeah sure and are there any kind of new products um in the pipeline i guess in the coming months really maybe early 2022 or anything that you you can talk about because i know often uh you know there's uh the exclusives you can't quite say anything just yet maybe um well yes you know everyone i think has their own plans for 2022 and not only i mean it's short medium and long term as well um i can't say that we have anything you know out of the out of the ordinary coming up um normal normal development features that are you know coming to make the product more appealing more complete to the market requirements uh maybe the the biggest plans are to expand you know so on the b2c side we were focused on a couple of markets and now from the b2b perspective we are planning to target a lot more than that yeah yeah so focusing on adam lata maybe africa asia and slowly getting into europe which is uh vastly regulated a bit saturated if you ask me but i think there's room for everyone we just need to find you know the niche where we can be the most uh relevant so we we talked to a kind of 2022 and and plans uh uh briefly we mentioned we'll go into a little bit more about that later as well but looking back um 2021 as a whole for the eye gaming industry how do you kind of reflect because obviously 2020 a lot of growth in online gaming you know a huge amount 2021 how does kind of how do you and gaming tech look back on on this year um well slightly difficult for me to assess you know the the growth that the company have because i'm still new here um looking at the numbers it's clear that there was a growth year after year i think 2020 was amazing for pretty much everyone in the online space with this pandemic link and you know everyone shifting a bit their their focus from retail to online and the players themselves you know having no more means to an end and no more places to go and gamble they had to open up accounts and of course um i think the market value in pretty much all markets increased drastically um i would say the trend kept on um being the same for 2021 and i think that it will still be the case for next year in the pandemic didn't go anywhere as we were all expecting it to just you know maybe half of 2021 we should have had a stop to it it seems not it seemed like you know fourth five fifth sixth wave are still coming up um a lot of lockdowns a lot of restrictions so i still think that the online space is going to be fully relevant um so yeah this is why you know i think every single operator and provider should be focusing on improving their ui their ux new features you know keeping the users engaged yeah so in terms of uh you mentioned a couple of trends there in uh previous you means you're kind of looking at regulated markets and obviously you so you expect still there to be strong growth in 2022. are there any other kind of trends that people should really uh really focus on in the industry when it comes to next year uh very good question and actually i read a couple of weeks ago a very interesting article you know about the importance of ux in this gambling industry comparing it to the iit industry or any other like travel you know and um hospitality and so on i think that a lot of operators are still thinking old yeah so there are a lot of sites which don't have an updated front-end for years and years and the players tend to be switching and this of course is also a matter of technology and markets so in europe you would find a lot of new technology being used in both back end and front end a lot of features being developed in no time yeah and this is mostly based on players feedback but when you go to i don't know africa lata maybe asia now you will discover that they are not necessarily following this trend and i'm pretty sure that you know with this uprising in technology worldwide i think this industry also needs to focus on on ui ux so this would be what i think that 2022 will will bring up for everyone you know improved experience improved interface and overall a player journey that can be uh more and more appealing yeah for sure that's kind of we've uh we've touched on the trends there i know my next question was going to be which i think you've touched on there as well was going to be what are the kind of biggest challenges eye gaming companies have at the moment going into 2022 but from what you're saying there i think that in itself is is a bit of a challenge and given the fact that it's such a competitive industry uh with so many kind of companies looking fighting that market share i guess that having the best ux is as well as a trend and a target it's a challenge as well exactly as you well said it's a challenge in itself and you know how do you differentiate yourself against competition well probably this is the best right now because everyone started to use the same idea of uh you know apis and having the best offering on the market those are all the titles that you would find yeah with any provider and any data provider in inspection best life coverage best coverage you know all of those words leading supplier i mean everyone is a leading supplier nowadays but what does that mean for the player yeah i mean the player wouldn't know what's happening behind most of the times so they are they they know what they are served with and this is the uh user experience yeah so yeah i think that's the main challenge sure so um we've thanks very much for your answer so far we've talked about some really interesting stuff i think for for a final kind of major topic for me final question if we were sitting here in 12 months time december 2022 um what for you would constitute a successful year for yourself and for gaming tech if you kind of had a couple of wishes of of kind of a maybe a christmas list this time next year um you know what what would be a good 20 22 for yourself very interesting question and i'm happy that you uh you asked me that because obviously we uh worked on a strategy yeah uh of course budgets and new hirings and all of that for 2022 so this b2b side of gaming tech is of course growing so the aim would be first of all to have um a proper team behind the project yeah key people experienced people that can actually help us grow um and this growth will be measured by kpis obviously so meeting those apis uh would definitely be number one on the list and you know among the kpis i would say having strategic clients um in key markets so manage having managed to expand you know as i just said previously that this is our main plan um having managed to increase revenues you know by a certain percentage that we have in mind and overall being more and more present and relevant to the market because right now you know from this b2b perspective gaming tech is not necessarily on the radar so if you ask me in 2022 i think this radar needs to be more and more on on gaming tech this is my main plan well andre best of luck with with your plans uh hopefully have a happy holiday period as well and thank you very much for your time thank you tim i wish you the same and i hope that next time we meet we will have more and more to talk absolutely thanks very much you