Betting’s Missing Layer

Funteron describes itself as the “discovery layer” between broadcasters and bookmakers rather than an affiliate or sportsbook. What is fundamentally different about your model?

Keith O’Loughlin: Three things we never do. We hold no funds, we set no odds and we accept no bets. Every bet placed through OddsFinder is placed with a licensed bookmaker, on their terms, under their licence. What we build is the discovery and comparison experience that sits in front of all of them, inside a media brand people already trust.

The easiest way to explain it is Skyscanner. Skyscanner does not fly planes and it does not sell you the seat. It shows you every airline in one place, you pick, and off you go. We do that for a bet. The difference is that we put it inside ITV rather than asking you to go and find us.

I spent twenty five years running sportsbooks. The most valuable thirty seconds in the whole industry is the moment someone decides who to bet with. Nobody had built a product for that moment. The bookmakers were too busy fighting over what happens after it and the affiliates were too busy sending people links. So we built it.

Andy Hoskins: Keith says “the moment”. I say plumbing. A sportsbook spends its life on the bet. An affiliate spends its life on the click. We spend ours on the bit in between, which is oddly where all the friction lives. Five operators live in the OddsFinder betslip at launch, 24 more on referral, one screen, prices moving in real time. The viewer gets a proper betting discovery experience. The bookmaker gets a customer arriving already decided. ITV sees neither the risk nor the capex.

Why was ITV the right launch partner, and what made this partnership possible when broadcasters have traditionally kept betting at arm’s length?

Keith: Broadcasters kept betting at arm’s length because the only two options were bad. Option one, become a bookmaker. That means a licence, a balance sheet, a compliance department and a headline the day something goes wrong. Option two, take affiliate money. That is a banner, a link and a shrug. Neither felt like something a national broadcaster should be doing on a Saturday afternoon.

We turned up with a third option. Operator economics, without becoming the bookmaker, taking the bet or setting the odds. The distinction that matters is simple. Funteron does not accept bets, hold customer funds or set odds. The regulated betting relationship stays with the licensed operator, where it belongs. Once that was clear, the conversation with ITV stopped being about whether and started being about when.

And ITV itself was obvious. They have the racing rights, the audience and a brand that has been in British living rooms for seventy years. If you are going to ask people to trust a betting product, you want the trust to be borrowed from somebody who has earned it.

ITV OddsFinder launched around Glorious Goodwood. What metrics will determine whether the launch has been a success?

Andy: Downloads are the number everyone asks about and the one I care least about. Downloads tell you the marketing worked. They tell you nothing about the product.

What I watch is three things. Did it work, meaning stability, app store ratings and how fresh the prices were when it mattered. Did people compare, meaning what share of users looked at more than one bookmaker before choosing, because if they did not compare we have built an expensive advert. And did they come back, meaning week two and week three without being reminded.

The honest test is York. If the same people who used it at Goodwood open it again for the Ebor without ITV having to tell them, that is the launch working. Everything else is a press release.

You talk a lot about “choice” and “transparency”. How important is consumer trust when asking viewers to compare bookmakers within a broadcaster’s ecosystem?

Keith: Trust is not a feature of the product. Trust is the product. Take it away and what is left is a list.

So the rules are simple. Best price is best price. Nobody buys the top spot. If a bookmaker rang me tomorrow and offered a fortune to be ranked first regardless of their odds, the answer would be no, and not because I am a saint. It would be because the product would be dead within a month and deservedly so. The moment a viewer suspects the order is for sale, they go back to whoever they were using before and they never open the app again.

There is a second part, which is that we are doing this inside ITV. Every design choice has to survive the question “would ITV be comfortable with this on screen”. Neutral defaults, nothing hidden, no tricks. That is a discipline most betting products have never had imposed on them. It has made ours better.

Odds comparison isn’t new. What have existing comparison services failed to solve that Funteron believes it has?

Keith: Odds comparison is not new. What is new is where it sits.

Traditional comparison is a destination. The customer has to decide to go there, and it was largely built for experienced bettors: dense price grids, desktop first habits and a commercial model built around referral. Perfectly good for the person who already has six apps open. Not much use to the person on the sofa.

We started with a completely different user. Somebody watching sport who wants an answer in twenty seconds. So Funteron is not a destination, it is infrastructure embedded inside the sports experience they have already chosen. We are not asking ITV’s audience to leave ITV, find a comparison site and then find a bookmaker. The discovery, the comparison and the choice all happen inside the ITV environment, and it feels like something you would actually use during the racing rather than a spreadsheet.

So comparison is not really the innovation. Distribution plus experience is.

Your platform aggregates live prices from multiple bookmakers in real time. What have been the biggest technical challenges in delivering genuinely up-to-date pricing at scale?

Andy: Horse racing is the hardest sport on earth to do this for, which is naturally the one we launched with.

Every operator sends prices in a different format, at a different speed, with a different name for the same thing. Is it “Each Way” or “E/W”? Is that horse spelled the same way in all thirty feeds? A non-runner is declared ten minutes before the off and nine bookmakers update in seconds while one takes a minute. Prices in the last two minutes before a race move faster than anything in football. A stale price is worse than no price, because someone clicks through and finds a different number, and now they do not trust you.

So the real engineering is not the display. It is matching, normalising and knowing when to throw a price away. Franz and the team in Belgrade, Lviv and Athens have built that from scratch, and a fair few of them did the same job at OpenBet, so it was not their first rodeo.

For the record, Apple approved the app at nine minutes past ten on the morning before Goodwood. I would like to tell you we were calm about it.

Funteron says it doesn’t want to own the bet, only “the moment before the bet.” Does that position make you more attractive to broadcasters and sports rights holders than traditional affiliate models?

Keith: Yes, and the reason is that we are never in conflict with anyone.

The industry has spent decades optimising the sportsbook. We think the valuable new layer is the one immediately before it. Call it the decision layer. It is where the customer decides whether to bet, what to bet on and which operator to use. It existed, but it was fragmented across search, affiliate links, comparison sites and individual bookmaker apps. Nobody had really built it as a consumer experience in its own right.

We do not compete with the bookmaker. We send them customers. We do not compete with the broadcaster. We do not want to take their audience away. We help the broadcaster serve and monetise that audience inside its own environment. In the affiliate model the media brand is a billboard. Somebody rents the space, sends the traffic somewhere else and the brand never sees the customer again. In our model the media brand is the venue. The experience happens inside it, it carries the brand’s name and it is powered by Funteron.

Rights holders do not want to be bookmakers. I know because I was one and I can tell you it is not a hobby. They want their audience monetised properly, safely and with their name on it. That is exactly the decision layer, and it is the only thing we do.

The website suggests Funteron is designed for recreational bettors rather than experienced gamblers. Why?

Keith: Because the experienced bettor is already extraordinarily well served and the much larger recreational audience is not. They get the professional’s tools or nothing.

The professional already knows where the value is and has six apps open. The person watching ITV on a Saturday has three questions. Who has the best price, can I trust them and can I do this before the race goes off. If you answer those three in twenty seconds, you have won. If you show them a grid of decimals and an arbitrage calculator, they put the phone down and ring their brother in law.

I have never been that interested in the sharp end. It is well looked after. The rest of the audience has been waiting a long time for somebody to build something for them, and they are watching the racing right now.

Your Greek deployment reportedly saw registration-to-first-deposit conversion increase from around 30 per cent to more than 70 per cent. What changes drove that improvement, and how transferable are those lessons to the UK market?

Andy: Peak months were above 70 per cent, which put performance well above the ranges we had typically seen for that step.

What drove it was that we stopped losing people between deciding and doing. Most of the drop between registration and first deposit is not people changing their minds. It is people getting bored, confused or interrupted. So we cut the steps. One registration instead of many. Account opening in seconds inside the app rather than a redirect to somebody else’s signup form. Someone arrives at the bookmaker having already seen the price, chosen the operator and decided they want the bet. The bookmaker just has to not get in the way.

The other finding I would point to is that the average user opened 1.8 operator accounts through us. Nobody made them. They compared, they chose, and then they chose again for the next bet. That is the whole model, observed in a live regulated market rather than a survey.

How transferable is it? Humans are humans. Intent and friction work the same in Athens and Aintree. What is different in the UK is more operators, stronger affordability checks and a more mature customer, so I am not standing here promising Greek numbers. I am saying the mechanism is the same and the direction will be the same.

Funteron claims to have integrated 15 licensed operators, while your product team has spoken about eventually offering more than 30 UK operators. How complete do you ultimately want the comparison offering to become?

Andy: The numbers have moved on a bit. We have 60 signed brands across our markets now, and in the UK ITV OddsFinder launched with five operators live in the betslip but my target is to add one a week. So the thirty is not an ambition, it is roughly where we are.

On completeness, the target is simple. A viewer should never need to open another app to check they have got a good price. That is the floor. It is not a trophy. I am not interested in having every licensed operator in the country for the sake of a big number. Every operator on the platform is licensed and has to meet the standards we set for participation. Complete enough that you trust it, curated enough that you should.

Beyond horse racing, which sports do you see as offering the biggest opportunity for ITV OddsFinder? Football seems an obvious next step, but are there others?

Andy: Football is the obvious one, and obvious for a reason. It is the biggest betting sport in the country and the prices are easier to handle than racing, so having built for the hard case first we are in decent shape.

Beyond that I would look at where ITV’s audience already is and where the price differences between bookmakers are widest. Darts is a phenomenon and wildly under served. Golf has huge outright markets where the spread between operators can be enormous, which is exactly where comparison earns its keep. And the NFL has built a substantial and increasingly engaged UK audience, much of it younger and entirely mobile.

The rule is the same each time. Go where the viewer already is and where comparing actually changes the answer. If every bookmaker is the same price, we add nothing. Where they are not, we add a lot.

You describe Funteron as infrastructure rather than a consumer betting brand. Is the long-term ambition to power multiple media companies, or could the technology also be used by leagues, clubs and publishers?

Keith: Nobody should ever download a Funteron app. That is the whole point.

The ambition is not to build another betting brand. It is to build the infrastructure layer connecting trusted sports audiences with the regulated betting market. The media company owns the audience. The bookmaker owns the bet. Funteron powers the decision in between. ITV is the first expression of that. If we are right, the consumer will not think about Funteron very often, in the same way they do not think about most of the infrastructure behind the services they use every day. The media company and the operator absolutely will.

So yes, it is a network. National media brands first, with scarcity and exclusivity where that creates the strongest proposition, because that is where the audience and the trust already sit. Then leagues and clubs, who have the fans, the fixtures and a lot of nervousness about betting, which is precisely the problem we solve. Every one of them carries “powered by Funteron” because that is the one thing we insist on. What we will not do is become a traffic broker for anyone with a website. The network is built on brands people trust. Adding brands people do not trust would spend that faster than we could earn it.

Andy: The thing about infrastructure is that it is boring right up until it is not. Nobody talks about the pipes until they are the only pipes. Racing on ITV was the first tap. We are now working on the next ones, and I would rather show you than tell you