Why Speed to Market Is Becoming an Infrastructure Problem for iGaming Operators

With the rate of expansion in iGaming picking up pace as more countries legalise and legitimise the industry, it’s reasonable for operators to focus on achieving exceptional market penetration, and that often means being quickest to be first in a given region. While this is an admirable and important goal, the impact from an infrastructure perspective can be concerning, with a bevvy of potential bottlenecks and blind spots arising from reliance on legacy backend systems. Let’s talk over why this has become an issue.

Regulatory Wranglings

The way iGaming is regulated from country to country might be superficially similar, but the underpinnings of compliance are always more nuanced and complex than this first impression implies. So, a slot site that offers Gates of Olympus in Canada might struggle to provide the same experience in a European market because of the divergences in regulations and the need for hyper-local architecture that these create.

Specifically, there’s often a requirement for player data to be held and hosted domestically, as opposed to being housed in offshore data centres, coupled with a raft of other data protection rules to comply with. If an operator is not prepared for the infrastructural implications of meeting these expectations, then getting licensed in a new market might be a challenge in the first place.

Aside from ensuring that there’s the right physical infrastructure in place to keep regulators happy across multiple regions, operators also have to think about speed to market from a software compliance perspective. Having a degree of modularity, allowing for platform components to be tweaked individually without requiring the entire stack to be rejigged, makes sense for this reason.

Payment Problems

The second and similarly important aspect of speed to market that operators need to grasp in the current context is how payment infrastructure plays a part in attracting and retaining players. Deposits and withdrawals have become far quicker over time, and if a new customer isn’t able to add funds to their iGaming account and redeem a bonus in a matter of seconds, then they might seriously consider taking their business elsewhere.

Coupled with the need to meet anti-money laundering regulations and a host of other financial requirements unique to each operational jurisdiction a platform launches in, there’s another spider’s web of infrastructural issues to untangle here. The solution lies in third-party payment platform integration, not in-house setups that might have sufficed in the past. A payment solution which is capable of handling transactions from customers in every corner of the planet, not just one market or region, will forever be the best way to go about things.

Latency Issues

Lastly, an imperfect iGaming infrastructure will hamper the best-intended speed-to-market plans if it doesn’t deliver a satisfying moment-to-moment play experience for end users. Even a few milliseconds of lag can make a platform seem long in the tooth and untrustworthy. Having servers set up to provide high-speed access to specific markets, as well as optimising the underlying databases on which they operate, prevents such reputation-marring mistakes.