AI is becoming integral for the world of iGaming, with some companies at the forefront of maximizing its potential. One such example is Fast Track – known as the leading CRM platform for the iGaming industry. CEO and co-founder Simon Lidzén explains how the group helps companies become leaner and more efficient and the group’s excitement to showcase its products and team at the upcoming ASEAN Gaming Summit.
We’re joined today by Simon Lidzén, CEO and co-founder of Fast Track. Thank you for being with us.
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
We’ve got a lot of interesting things coming up. And in particular, we’ve got the ASEAN Gaming Summit, which I know that you guys are going to be a main key component of. But I want to see in terms of Fast Track, what are the main opportunities that you’re seeing in Asia right now?
I think the opportunities in the Asian market is pretty much the same, mirroring the same shift that we’re seeing across the entire world at the moment. Organizations are up against being AI-led for the future. And we have to sort of get our organizations, our technology, people and processes aligned with the AI opportunity that helps you scale ahead. So it’s an incredible sort of gaming operational piece that we are undertaking right now, in order to help operators through these changes.
I know that you’ve been lauded as a great contributor to the iGaming industry. That continues to grow exponentially. How does Fast Track CRM platform help with that growth?
Fast Track, we are composed of – if you go way, way back – Fast Track has been founded by people who have been in the gaming industry for a very long time. And I think that lends itself, like having the experience within the team – even if you’re looking at an entire organization of Fast Track – the majority of the people, if not pretty much everyone, has an idea and operational background from the past.
We have both sort of a regulated background and sort of non-regulated sort of history behind what we’ve done in the past, which adds a lot of value into helping our partners being successful in the transition and being successful with their operations and how we can develop technology that helps operators essentially deliver and manifest their CRM strategies in the right way.
And having that history, I think, has really shaped how Fast Track has been set up and configured, because we are iGaming focused, completely iGaming focused as a business. And whilst we are a sort of a source technology service, we are specializing in this industry, we are specializing in helping operators be successful with their CRM initiatives and grow and scale as organizations.
Part of that is the scalability. One of the main offerings that you have is helping them to scale their operations and their teams. So how big are these teams?
Well, it really varies. I mean, we have business all over the globe, we do a considerable amount of business in Asia, as well as we do in in South America and Africa and Europe and the rest of the Americas as well. Teams vary in sizes depending on the size of organizations, but something that never changes is the need for a lean organization that is efficient, that is sort of where you are, number one. That you have the capabilities from a technological perspective to manifest your strategy, that you have the capabilities to do the type of promotions and engage your players in the way you want.
The second part is obviously how much people does that actually require. What we have seen and we have invested in a lot is that the kind of the old school CRM, if you’re looking at the traditional wherever you’re doing CRM, we have been defining our players into different groups and then we have been building campaigns that are targeting these different groups of players.
The problem is that as we are trying to win our customers’ loyalty, the players’ loyalty with our brand, because it’s a very competitive space, we’ve figured out as operators that we need to be more relevant, and we need to be more personal in our engagement, that means that we need to recognize what is important for every individual and how we’re targeting them, whether it be different games, different bonuses, different content, and all of these different things.
Now, the traditional CRM platforms in this landscape, they don’t scale towards that, like it doesn’t work. Because every time you’re trying to become more relevant, you will introduce a new layer of segmentation or a new channel or a new type of bonus. And that is essentially multiplying the number of campaigns that you will have to create. And operational teams would be exponentially growing their workload as a result of this. And that’s just because of the technological limitations.
When I talk about Fast Track, what we have, we have approached the challenge in a completely different way, which meant that we recognize that hands-on it doubles the challenge. And we said, well, instead, let’s use AI, in order to do player profiling, so that we can identify this player, what matters to this person. And we have used our iGaming experience to develop the sort of the things that matter in that relationship to be able to target that player in the right way.
AI has been a huge component of what everybody is trying to work in right now, not only within the iGaming space. But how much of a component is it for you? How much is it currently involved in your operations? And do you expect that to increase in the future?
Oh, everything, I think every single aspect of the Fast Track platform that we are offering towards our partners, everything that we’re doing is currently in one way or form influenced by AI. We have our own dedicated data science team that is investing an enormous amount of resources and money in order to develop a more relevant player profiling, that we have the right type of targeting. We have the singularity project, where we are inviting operators to work with our data science team in order to do experimentation and evolve this. And we also take advantage of every single aspect of AI and Chat GPT, which has taken everyone by storm. That is completely embedded into the platform.
Fast Track as an organization takes advantage of all of these different type of AI technologies ourselves. And we also build that into the Fast Track platform, providing it to our operator partners. So, if you wanted to really accelerate and get the best technology, the best technological capabilities, I think we are well positioned in order to provide a really good solution.
AI is obviously taking over the industry, and it is an essential part of what people need to be doing in iGaming, land-based, etc. But we do have an exciting place where we can talk about that even more, which is going to be at the ASEAN Gaming Summit, coming up on March 19th. What are you expecting for that? Are you excited for it?
I’m super excited about it. Now, I haven’t been doing that many conferences and trade shows in Asia myself basically, my team has. So, I’m particularly excited myself personally to come and see everyone and participate in conversations, workshops and presentations at the venue. So that’s great, and it’s gonna be fantastic to connect with entrepreneurs, individuals and successful operators in the market and hear their stories and see what type of challenges they’re facing and how. I’m very curious about these things, it’s something that engages me a lot, is hearing about what’s happening on the other side. And something that I can take with me and shape how the future of the product looks. I’m very excited.
I mean, that’s a huge component of it. It’s meant to be about getting people together and having them tell their truths to each other so that we can uplift the industry as a whole. Fast Track itself has been recognized as the iGaming industry CRM leader. What can we expect to see from Fast Track at the ASEAN Gaming Summit?
I mean, we are there with personnel, we have a stand, which is of the conference that we’re doing, and we’re doing a speaking opportunity. So, we’re going to be on stage when there is an opportunity to hear not only meet the people, meet the brand, but also hear about the product and offering that we have and how that can really change the game and help sort of upgrade and superpower operators in general. So, I’m very excited about getting the full-service, the 360: the people, the brand, and the product, to be able to showcase it and show it to people.
We’re gonna see you there – March 19th, in Manila. Thank you again, Simon Lidzén – CEO and co-founder of Fast Track. Thank you for your time.
Thank you very much for having me. Thank you.
