The Online Transformation: Picking up Speed, with Jesper Kärbrink, Chairman of CEGO

Jesper Karbrink, Chairman, CEGO recently spoke with us about the increased acceleration of offline to online player conversion.

Jesper believes these new exciting times present some fantastic opportunities to grow but not without some key challenges coming along with it. Read below as we explore the new digital landscape with Jesper and get his perspective on what the future holds.

What has been the biggest lesson you’ve learnt from your Covid-19 experience and how will you use it to your advantage going forward for the exciting CEGO brand?

“From an internal perspective, it has been fascinating to see how fast and frictionless the organisation adopted a new way of working – without losing focus or efficiency.

From a player’s perspective we – as most other operators – saw an increase in our numbers at the beginning of the pandemic.

But looking more closely at these numbers, it is not so much an increased volume per player but more new players joining, indicating that what we see now is an increased (speed of) transformation, from offline to online.”

Some argue that typical slots content may not attract a new, younger audience to our market. What sort of products and customer trends can we encourage as an industry to help attract this demographic and ensure sustained growth of the market?

“Typical slots will always have a market, but adding more challenging casino games – on top of this- with added levels of skill, like what we see in the social gaming area, will probably attract both new player segments as well as offering new ways of gambling and entertainment to our current players

To some extent, I think we have proven this with our own games.

80% of our revenue comes from our internal games that have more focus on entertainment than perhaps more regular slots.

With the success we have had with our internal games we will, of course, see if we can develop this further.”

The novel market conditions we currently find ourselves in means more players than ever may be potentially vulnerable to problem gambling. What are your thoughts on Sweden’s recent decision to extend their temporary Covid-19 measures such as 5000SEK loss limits until 2021? Is this the best way forward? What can we do, as industry stakeholders, to ensure markets remain competitive whilst still protecting at risk players?

“For CEGO it is key to follow regulation.

We are one of the few casinos that has 100% of its revenue generated from so-called white markets.

We also attract more leisure players and fewer whales than most others, therefore for us, these newer regulations are not as a bad.

However, having that said, it is extremely important that regulations are balanced to keep a high level of channelisation.

But one must remember that the industry also has a responsibility for how this develops.

From CEGO’s point of view, we had already decided in 2019 to reduce our marketing budget with ca 20% to help create a better public image of the industry.

We have also, as most others, invested in RG tools to help our customers control their gambling.

Another area we are looking at is affordability checks since we believe this perhaps can be the strongest initiative the industry can take in order to reduce problem gambling.”

The iGaming market is growing faster than any other gambling sector, many operators will be looking into new regions for growth. CIS is becoming an increasingly popular region. What are your thoughts on the future of this region and what tips could you give operator or supplier hoping to enter this region in the future?

“Our focus has, up until this year, only been on our home market Denmark.

We launched our first international brand in Sweden in early 2020 and we are using the learnings from this for a wider international roll-out, that looks really interesting.

CIS is interesting since this is still a rather immature iGaming market meaning that growth will be high in the coming years with a strong offline to online transition, however, our strategy remains that we will only enter 100% regulated markets.”

Editor’s Notes: From speaking with Jesper it seems that in order for the iGaming market to sustain its growth in new player transformation, there will need to be a continued focus of more social, skill-based games to help attract newer, younger audiences. Also, through focusing more on casual players than whales, CEGO have mitigated the impact of sanctioned loss limit regulation, perhaps a formula for a better industry reputation that other operators should consider adopting in the future?