James King, chief executive at development platform Flows, took to the stage at iGaming NEXT: Valletta ’21, to argue that one of the key limiting factors which slows innovation in the iGaming industry is the number of people who have the technological capability to deliver new ideas.

While businesses such as Ikea have empowered customers to build their own furniture, and Amazon has empowered sellers to have access to a global marketplace, the ability to innovate at speed and quickly react to change and trends doesn’t exist in the iGaming industry, he argued.

There is no lack of ideas in our industry, King said, but our ability to deliver is held back by legacy systems, and more importantly, legacy mentalities.

These mentalities have built high walls around gaming businesses, and prevented companies from sharing best practices, he added, but it is time for this to change during the digital revolution currently taking place.

King argued that the Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated the need to improve digital delivery within iGaming – the situation has placed additional pressure and responsibility upon technology and IT teams, and added more steps into already overcrowded roadmaps, he said.

Changes in the US have also shown that iGaming is going mainstream – and coming to be seen as a true entertainment industry. But this has caused large businesses from outside the gambling space to enter the industry, including Disney, which has a market capitalisation of around $300bn.

This, he said, is why it is so important for businesses to be able to innovate quickly, in a frictionless manner.

King then introduced the audience to Flows, “the innovation platform that sets your ideas free”.

Flows is a self-service platform for innovation and digital empowerment, helping to accelerate the delivery of digital products and allowing teams to build features and applications “in minutes, instead of months.”

Prompted by event MC and host Oisin Lunny to prove this claim, King invited chief technical officer at Flows, Mike Broughton, to the stage, to demonstrate the capabilities of the platform in real time.

In the space of a few minutes, Broughton showed the audience how easily a team could add features to a game – by creating a new ‘bad luck’ pop-up correspondence to be sent to customers following a 3-round loss on a slot game.

But the platform is capable of much more than such simple features – it can also be used for authentications, risk and fraud analysis, and checks on payment providers.

“If you think it, ultimately, you can Flow it,” King concluded.

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