Betbrokers fancies Sapphire's form

Gambling company Betbrokers has used a Russian services company to develop its back-end systems.

The bet broker and clearing house, based in London's Canary Wharf, was launched in 2003 and offers punters one account to access all the markets and the best available prices for any sporting event without the need to manage a range of accounts with different bookmakers and betting exchanges.

It chose to develop a bespoke back-end system that effectively runs the whole company - rather than adapt an off-the-shelf offering - in preparation for its IPO in November 2006.

Betbrokers is a high-end business, with the average size of a bet going through the system standing at £1,200 - with the biggest so far being £250,000 - so the operation is a long way from the traditional high-street bookie.

The company's primary channel to market is through the phone but it also has a website.

Because the company was effectively creating a new market, the availability of ready-made packages was limited. IT director Carl Whitehead wanted a system that could handle the brokers' need for fast accurate access to betting data, report on that ongoing state of business across the company and be used for back-office functions.

He was approached by traditional suppliers coming from the financial services space but none of them had an offering that fit Betbrokers' particular business model.

Anglo-Russian supplier Sapphire Group got the deal - on price but also because Whitehead could mould the service it provided closely to his own needs.

He said: "They knew nothing about the gambling industry but they were prepared to listen and keen to learn."

Whitehead liked the way Sapphire's development is contracted to Russian engineers but he deals with a UK-based operation.

He said: "We were concerned with the remoteness of the operation and we were aware that Russia is the source of the majority of DNS attacks the gambling industry suffers but Sapphire gave us assurances that the system would be secure and the calibre of the Russian staff is high."

The system was at the core of Betbrokers' public offering and software specs were written into the proposal, so the technology had to be robust enough to reassure investors.

Before it was implemented, the company operated on an interim solution that had a large amount of manual process. It managed up to 400 customers and about 100 trades per day. Now the full system - dubbed internally as BB2 - is up, the limit to the number of customers it can handle has yet to be determined and the number of trades it handles per day is in the region of 40,000.

Initial development work cost the company upwards of £300,000. Whitehead doesn't expect ongoing development to cost more than £50,000 per year.

Now the foundations are in, there are opportunities to grow the business. First up, the development of a small deal order-execution system, which will allow the company to trade bets under £50 automatically.

Up to now, Betbrokers has operated as a high-end service to a niche customer, marketed through the specialist gambling press. Smaller value trades will open up a huge new market for the company and allow it to market through the mainstream tabloid press.