Sports Betting Conversations. Sports Integrity — Playing by the Rules
Did you know that the current US sports betting market works under 260 different jurisdictions and 260 sets of rules? So, there is a huge need for conflict-free and technology-driven sports betting compliance services. The DataArt team met with Matthew Holt, CEO of U.S. Integrity, to discuss game integrity and fraud prevention. Matthew shares how they provide security and confidentiality when analyzing an enormous amount of data for any abnormalities.
SPEAKERS
Russell Karp, Senior Vice President in the DataArt Media and Entertainment practice, focusing on sports betting.
Matthew Holt, CEO of U.S. Integrity. The goal of U.S. Integrity is to help ensure that every sports competition is fair and transparent. They partner with some of the largest professional sports leagues and collegiate conferences in the US, as well as licensed sports-betting operators and regulators, to ensure sports betting integrity in every play, every game, and every sport.
Kevin Twitchell, advisor in the DataArt Media and Entertainment practice.
Matthew Shatz, advisor in the DataArt Media and Entertainment practice.
Watch the full video or read a shortened text version below.
Russell Karp
How do you get around the challenge of making sure that the data you take in is handled securely? And when you have to share it, that’s also done securely?
Matthew Holt
I would say that secure sharing is just as difficult as the process of ingesting data. The great thing about ingesting all this data and information is you get to dictate or at least know how it’s all coming in. Where it gets trickier is who has access to each individual piece of information when an investigation starts. And sometimes those lines aren’t so clear. While we’re investigating this NBA game in these certain bets made by these certain people on this certain market. So, we have to let the operators in that particular state know the regulators in that particular state. But does the league have an obligation to know? Yes. But what can you share back with the league? Well, the individual books don’t want their wagers shared necessarily back. So, there’s certainly some sensitivities to all that. And, so far, so good.
We always say the most important number of tests in U.S. Integrity is zero — the number of clients we’ve ever lost in U.S. Integrity. And we understand that the day we start messing up data, breaking confidentiality, or losing the trust of our client, it’s going to be a mass exodus. So, we put a lot of thought and care into how we handle data, who has access to that data, and how that data is shared.
Matthew Shatz
Is there any difference, Matt? If you notice any irregularity in your answer, your outbound telling somebody else that this is something you’re looking into versus you got an inbound request to go look at a situation. Does the data process and who has access around that change, whether it’s inbound versus outbound?
Matthew Holt
It does. But most of how the system works is we pull in all of this data, real bets being placed in the US. We’re the only company that gets real betting data in the United States. So, we ingest all of this amazing data along with statistical and event data, and then our system flags for abnormalities. So naturally, 95% of the alerts are completely outbound anyway because our system flags something an analyst looked into. It elevated to a critical enough level where there’s an alert sent out. Very rarely is it at the opposite. We do get the opposite, and normally, it’s something like, “Hey, this player is going to be suspended, or this player is going to be out, or this player is not going to be on the team, and nobody knows yet.” We want to make sure that nobody’s leaking or selling that information ahead of time, and then we’ll pull that information, look, and then send stuff back to them. But I would say the vast majority of alerts we send out are flagged by our system, and analysts looked into it, and the alert level raised high enough to send something out.
Taking cover: How to Handle Bettors’ Sensitive Data
Kevin Twitchell
Are the operators very protective in giving you the data? Who ultimately owns that data? Are there some that are more restrictive in providing it to you, and where it goes after it leaves your hands? And with the volumes coming in systemically, what are you looking at for this year and next year to deal with that type of volume of data?
Matthew Holt
Huge amounts of data are coming in. One of the challenges with the data is that it never comes in standardized formats; no matter how easy we try to make it to just be a simple API in and out, it’s never that easy. And so many of these platforms coming over from Europe weren’t necessarily meant to share data because they never did before.
Matthew Holt
CEO of U.S. Integrity
They were very loose. I think “loose” is even a loose word here. We’ll just call them very loose integrity regulations throughout the rest of the world prior to the US legalizing across the country in May of 2018. And these platforms weren’t built to share data for the purposes that we do.
So, a lot of times, we get it in all kinds of formats, including some states which mandate the operators share data with us, but they don’t mandate it in real-time, within a reasonable amount of time. We’re like 2, 3, 4 in the morning, we’ll get these huge data dumps where it’s all the bets for the last 24 hours, and our system passes them out. So, the next morning, regulators come in compliance, folks at the operators come in, our analysts can go back and review, but we’re not necessarily catching anything in real-time, in the way that data comes in usually needs a lot of finessing to get into a usable format. So sometimes it’s just the way that we’re ingesting the data, being able to clean that data first and even just make it usable.
There’re certainly a lot of challenges. And then, of course, there’s the PI stuff, so we don’t pull in any personal information. So, in many cases, operators will give us account IDs. We know that there is a better ABC 123 out there, but we don’t know the name of ABC 123, and we intentionally do that because we don’t want to store that type of data. In the second you do, your cybersecurity risk and insurance go through the roof. Rather if we notice that account ABC 123 is participating in what we would consider suspicious activity, we get to notify that operator and notify a regulator simultaneously, and they can look into it. And if we end up needing to know the name for an investigation on a one-off basis, fine. But overall, we try not to handle any PI, as well, because that’s really where data gets problematic.
Russell Karp
Do you think there’s potential to standardize house rules across the entire industry, or that there are too many?
Matthew Holt
No, I think there is. And I think that you need to have really strict enforcement both ways on the sportsbooks that don’t. So, what we have seen in the past year is some of the newer sportsbooks using them as a marketing tool. So, hey, something happens there, the Kentucky Derby horse letting disqualify that horse till the next day, and you pay out those bets three minutes after the race is over. What are you supposed to do the next day? There are already paid out all the people who won on those bets today. Some books go ahead and start paying them anyway. And what happens is the sportsbooks start picking and choosing, “Well, this one we didn’t take a lot of action on, so we’ll just pay all the losers, send a couple of tweets, and tell our customers how much we appreciate them.” But when you don’t do it consistently, it leads to more customer confusion. And so, at the end of the day, house rules should be clear. They should be concise, and then they should be forced. The operators should be forced to follow them to a tee.
Russell Karp
So, let’s talk about some of the innovations in the industry. What have you seen over the past twelve months? And what do you see ahead for the industry?
Matthew Holt
The biggest thing I’ve seen in the last twelve months, and I don’t think it’s 100% solved, is the latency issue, which also results in the customer experience around in-play betting.
Matthew Holt
CEO of U.S. Integrity
So, for years, the problem with in-play betting was always that the time difference between what was happening on the field and what was happening on your TV was too great. It’d be like 45 seconds apart, a minute apart. But to have in-play betting, the sportsbooks would have to buy the live feed from the stadiums so the sportsbooks would be ahead of the TV. So, you’re watching a game, and you go to make a bet, and you’re like, “Well, why do the odds say that you would know what he’s going to throw a touchdown pass?” or, “Hey, I bet the Celtics make this next three”? Or “Hey, I bet The Red Sox hit a home run this at-bat” because you could tell by the odds what was going to happen. And made for a really bad customer experience.
And then, because the TV wasn’t synched with your odds or was so far off, you would look for breaks in the action to make a bet. But you weren’t even anywhere near aligned with what was happening. So, you’d go to make a bet, and it would say odds change; try again. So, you’re re-login and go to do it again. Well, you would try and fail seven or eight times and finally say, “Forget this; in-play betting sucks. I don’t even want to do it.” It was such a poor customer experience, and that’s why people always pointed to Europe and said, wow, almost 70% of the bets they’re placed in-play. Yeah, and 1.5% of the bets are in America placed in-play. And it wasn’t that Americans hated in-play or that the sports weren’t any good for them; it’s just it was such a poor customer experience. We’ve seen those in-play betting numbers that were 2% 18 months ago are almost 10% of the marketplace now. And 10% may not seem like a lot when you’re comparing it to Europe, but it’s five times greater than it was just 18 months prior. The industry, through technology, has done such an amazing job of making that a fun and positive customer experience that it’s supposed to be instead of the frustrating one it was for so long.
Matthew Shatz
Is that because certain companies have come along and improved the speed at which they can transmit the data? Or what’s driving that experience, getting better?
Matthew Holt
A lot of it, either data is transmitted much faster or even TV broadcast period can go, that latency that they need for things is much lower than it’s ever been through the use of technology. And then the sportsbooks compensated a little bit on their go to make a bet in play that you never take that bet and hit submit. It just automatically goes through. It always spins for a few seconds. So, they said, “All right, well, if the TV people can get us down to a seven-second delay and we can make that thing spin for six seconds now, we’re only two seconds different. Seems like we’re almost real-time.” So, both sides met in the middle a little bit. And here we go. Now we have a product that’s a much better user experience, much more frequency of the bets getting through a much better sync with the experience the viewers are having. Thus, not surprisingly, we’re seeing a lot more bets getting placed in play.
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By Russell Karp,
Vice President of Media and Entertainment Practice at DataArt
Originally published at https://www.dataart.com/.
