“Innovation” is often cited in B2B iGaming—but what does it really look like in practice? As the market matures, meaningful innovation goes beyond flashy interfaces; it’s about solving operational challenges, driving player engagement, and building scalable, future-ready solutions.
We talk to Deborah Conte Santoro at Swiss Casinos, Alex Lorimer at Gaming Corps, and Mathias Larsson at Awager to help define what innovation truly means today.
How do you balance the need to innovate with the need to stay compliant in a heavily regulated environment?
Deborah Conte Santoro: “Operating in Switzerland, one of the world’s most highly regulated markets, means we place great importance on player protection. To balance innovation with compliance, we’ve augmented our compliance teams with automated, trigger-based workflows that flag and address issues in real time. Every new product and feature is developed with legal and QA experts embedded alongside our dev and ops teams from day one, ensuring all innovations are vetted against Swiss regulatory requirements. We also conduct ongoing training for all staff, educating them on innovation boundaries and proper usage of new tools. This “compliance-by-design” approach lets us move quickly while achieving the highest responsible gaming standards.”
Alex Lorimer: “We have recently entered our 20th regulated market in a little over three years, so regulation and compliance are really important to us. That said, when it comes to innovation, it sometimes feels like attitudes are rooted very much in the past with a lack of desire to create regulatory frameworks for cutting edge products – in most cases, these products are just as true in an RNG sense as a traditional slot but just decorated up in a way that makes them more engaging. In fact, in most instances, non-traditional games and experiences provide a slower and more casual experience than you get when hammering a high volatility slot. I hope we see a bit of a shift in regulators being more open to new game formats.”
Mathias Larsson: “This is actually a really tricky one because, in most instances, the regulator can’t give you the green light on a product until it is built and operational. But this means you could potentially develop a non-compliant product or at least have to go back to the drawing board and make pretty significant changes to ensure it meets requirements. To mitigate this risk, we ensure not to push the boundaries too far so that we don’t give the regulator a reason to find an issue with the product. Regulators are not there to block innovative products, they just need to ensure they meet standards when it comes to things like RNG fairness, server locations and responsible gambling.”
Is the industry innovating for operators’ needs or for end-player experience and should it be doing more of one?
Deborah Conte Santoro: “Innovation cannot be an either-or between operators and players, as they are inherently interdependent. Every technical advance for operators must directly enable richer, more responsive experiences for players, and player insights must feed back into operator tooling, creating a virtuous cycle where back-end and front-end innovation evolve together. Only by balancing both can the industry achieve sustainable growth and truly differentiated offerings.
“We believe that online casinos, with their real-time, on-site environments, naturally offer a wide range of tools and data-analysis capabilities. By contrast, in our four land-based casinos, it’s been challenging to introduce innovation on the floor. The selection of slot machines is limited, and game variety refreshes very slowly compared to online – to me, land-based still operates like a dinosaur behind its digital counterpart. Here, we would definitely welcome more operator-focused technologies to bridge the gap and bring the floor up to the speed of online.”
Alex Lorimer: “I’d say it’s both. The new generation of players coming through expect an entertainment experience more akin to a AAA console title than a standard slot – hitting spin and waiting to see if they win or not doesn’t really cut it for this demographic. This is requiring studios to innovate and come up with new formats, mechanics, features and gameplay so that their operator partners can offer content that meets their expectations. As a studio, we need to develop games that operators want to add to their lobbies, but they will only add games that hit the mark with players. So really, the two audiences go hand in hand more than one over the other.”
Mathias Larsson: “Operators need to connect directly with players and deliver the experiences they are seeking through the games, products and experiences developed by suppliers. But since the operator is a client of a B2B provider, innovation must first engage the operator and meet their needs, which is to source games, products and experiences that will thrill and excite their players. So this creates something of a chicken and egg scenario.
“For me, innovation always needs to focus on the end user and the experience it provides to them, but it needs to be packaged up and delivered in a way that it catches the eye of a casino manager and makes them want to add it to their offering. Awager is the perfect example of this – it delivers something truly unique to players while piquing the interest of operators looking for new ways to entertain their customers.”
What’s the biggest innovation opportunity in iGaming that no one is really talking about?
Deborah Conte Santoro: “We believe that innovation lies in truly merging online and offline. Online games thrive on highly competitive, user-centric design, and only the top titles survive in a market driven by real-time analytics and dynamic content.
“Imagine if these successful game providers, who currently deliver only digital content, could offer their hits device-agnostically on the casino floor. With cloud-based content streaming and API-driven game distribution, titles could rotate in real time, game offerings could adapt to foot-traffic patterns, and player profiles could be leveraged across channels. This would be a win-win for both worlds, bringing iGaming’s variety, agility, and personalisation to land-based venues, transforming static slot lobbies into dynamic showrooms that evolve continuously with demand.”
Alex Lorimer: “That’s the $100 million question. For me, it’s community engagement and how we create, grow, tap into and ultimately monetise different player communities. I think it’s insane how streamers can have such a strong influence on player preferences and product roadmaps, but that’s the world we now live in. It’s not uncommon for more people to watch a streamer play a game than to actually play the game itself. We need to get these observers to become actively involved, and one way to do this is to allow them to play with or against streamers and or brand ambassadors.”
Mathias Larsson: “True omni-channel products and experiences. In regulated markets, and especially the US, omni-channel operators have a massive advantage. But at Awager, we see this advantage not being maximised and, in most cases, this is because the operator does not have the right tools from their B2B providers. Awager clearly fits into the omni-channel ecosystem and is indeed a tool that operators can use to bridge the gap between their online and land-based offerings. Our solution can be used to drive land-based players online and online players to the retail casino, and this is what makes it such a good fit in the omni-channel space.”
