Giving Racing Customers a Better Price

Ben, you’ve spent 20 years at Entain and its predecessor businesses. What kept you there, and why was this the right time to move?

I joined Coral straight out of university, initially taking calls from the shops and dealing with queries, before progressing into the racing team. It was a very different job then. There was much more compiling, with a detailed focus on a handful of good races each day. Now we’re betting on racing around the clock. I’ve always been interested in international racing, which was really starting to take off when I joined. I picked it up, made it my own and grew with it. It gave me a great grounding in different feed providers, systems and relationships.

With an established product such as UK and Irish racing, a lot of the processes are already understood. When you add a new international territory, you have to work out how the product operates and how everything fits together. Things go wrong, and you become very used to solving problems and improving the service. It was a great education. I was very happy, but Pythia approached me and I’ve always been interested in modelling. Racing pricing has traditionally been very market-driven: bookmakers put up prices and knowledgeable customers help shape them. That works, but it can be expensive and resource-intensive.

The opportunity to use modelling to offer customers a better, more reliable set of prices really appealed to me. Ultimately, I want to give them a square deal.

How has international racing evolved, and how much opportunity remains for bookmakers?

It started with the core territories, such as the US, France and South Africa, and expanded from there. Suddenly, you have customers wanting to bet on Japanese racing at five in the morning. That has helped create a 24/7 product. The other change is when prices become available. We’ve gone from offering prices for the final five or 10 minutes before a race to offering them 24 hours beforehand.

There is still plenty of room to grow. Across the industry, a significant part of the international portfolio is still only priced shortly before the off. Extending that availability and improving the product is an exciting opportunity.

What did working through the changes from Coral to Ladbrokes Coral, GVC and Entain teach you?

You learn to adapt. You might have a new boss, or a new boss’s boss, and the priorities and ways of working change. That challenges you to think about what you’re doing and why, rather than getting stuck in your ways. The biggest operational shift was from looking in detail at a handful of races to trying to make prices available across a huge volume of racing. Accurately pricing that volume has been the challenge.

You already knew Pythia as a customer. What made you want to join the business?

In any large, multi-product organisation there are lots of competing priorities, and getting traction for racing, particularly international racing, can be difficult. Getting traction for international racing can be harder still. You might identify a small improvement that would only take a day or two to deliver, but getting it over the line can be difficult when there are so many other priorities to balance.

At Pythia, racing is the product. That means much more focus on the things I care about. There is also the technology, modelling infrastructure, historical data and expertise to draw on. Historical data is expensive, but it is essential if you want to model a product properly. Our longer-term ambition is to extend good-quality pricing across the full racing portfolio. We’re building towards that, and having these resources puts us in a strong position to do so.

Having spent years working with racing suppliers, where do you see the biggest gap between what operators receive and what they need?

Historically, much of the responsibility for pricing has fallen on bookmakers, particularly those at the top of the market. Take the American product. On a Saturday, you might have 15 meetings with 10 races at each. That is a lot of racing to price accurately, but someone has to do it. The work of the leading bookmakers then influences the wider market. We need to make that process easier and more efficient, while giving the customer a better offering. That is a big part of what appeals to me about Pythia’s model.

How much of a racing trader’s job can be automated, and where does human expertise still matter?

There is understandable concern about AI and jobs, but repetitive manual tasks are one of my biggest frustrations. Someone can be occupied with 20 clicks while a bet comes through that needs their attention. If we remove that manual work, traders have more time to concentrate on the things that matter. They can monitor the business, make decisions and develop tools that improve how they work.

People don’t generally want to sit around doing nothing. Give them time back and they will find productive ways to use it. That can mean greater efficiency, a better product or better pricing. Removing the manual overhead creates room for those improvements.

You’ve also been developing AI-based trading tools. Beyond pricing, where could AI make the biggest difference?

Customer assessment could be a big opportunity. If you get the pricing right and combine that information with a customer’s betting activity, you can form a more accurate picture of that customer and make better-informed decisions. Getting those decisions right benefits the customer as well as the business.

Some of the customers winning or losing a few per cent are the people who really love racing. They go racing, encourage their friends to go and spend money on racing information. They put money and enthusiasm back into the wider ecosystem. Making those decisions more efficiently and accurately could have a positive effect across the product.

In-play racing hasn’t developed in the same way as in-play betting on other sports. What is holding it back?

The time available is a big factor. A Flat race can be over in a minute, and there is a lot happening. Trying to follow several different outcomes in a bet builder, or make an in-play decision, is very different from doing it over a 90-minute football match. I think in-play betting on jump racing has done well. You have more time for the race to develop, and that makes it a good product.

In-play is something you need to offer, and I expect it to become an increasingly established part of racing betting. But technology doesn’t necessarily remove the underlying time constraint. Customers often want a moment to think before placing a bet, and in a short race they may only have a few seconds to react.

With so much attention on new betting products, how confident are you in racing’s appeal?

Very confident. Racing is an exciting betting product, and I don’t think that appeal is going away. It has been around for a long time, so it can feel as though many of the opportunities have already been explored. But being an established, proven product is also a strength. We do need to keep evolving and improving it. I just don’t have a huge concern that racing will suddenly be displaced by something else.

What would you most like to achieve at Pythia?

I’d love us to become the provider of choice across the industry, known for the quality of our data, delivery and feeds, as well as our pricing. Reliability is probably my number one priority. After 20 years on the operator side, I know how disruptive it is when feeds don’t work.

If we can become a supplier that customers regard as absolutely reliable, that would be a major achievement for me. Alongside that, of course, we want to keep improving the quality of the prices.

Are you helping to build a supplier that could eventually make your old job unnecessary?

I don’t see it that way. Automation will change how some manual tasks are done, but people are adaptable. Take away a repetitive task and they can move on to something more useful. Racing also has nuances that make it difficult to automate every aspect of it. There is still judgement involved, and I think you will always need oversight. I wouldn’t be comfortable with simply setting everything running and taking our hands off the wheel. There still needs to be human accountability.

What keeps you excited about racing after 20 years?

Working on the international product, we saw a lot of model-driven business from sophisticated syndicates. I’ve always found that fascinating: the idea that you can understand racing through data and build models that price it more accurately. What excites me now is using that intelligence to give the customer a better product. If someone takes 2/1 and an hour later the horse is 10/1, that is a poor customer experience. Those kinds of movements happen every day.

If we can work towards having an efficient price available at every stage, we can give customers more confidence when they bet. That is a really worthwhile thing to aim for.