Introduction – Stefan Kovach, CEO

Firstly we’d like to wish everyone and their families well in these unprecedented times caused by the global coronavirus outbreak. We’ve been lucky at FunFair as we’ve not to date been impacted, all our staff are healthy and we’ve always been geared up to work remotely. Also as many will have seen the online casino industry is less impacted by what’s taken place and will likely benefit with fewer options for people to visit land-based casinos or sportsbet online. We sincerely hope that things are back to normal for everyone as soon as possible.

Q1 snapshot of key deliverables

Looking at Q1 it was a busy first quarter, and we’ve been diligently working to execute the goals set out in our Q1 update in January.



Firstly, we’re proud to announce that our first localised language, Japanese is now live! This is a monumental step for both FunFair and our B2C brands. CasinoFair, is the first brand to feature Japanese and is currently focusing on local affiliates as well as looking at localisation and testing acquisition activity in at least one other market as well.

Operationally we’ve recruited a Japanese native country executive to work across site management, customer service, marketing and promotions. We’ve also brought on board more resources for Canada across the community, customer service and marketing, increasing our local coverage in key markets.

Another key objective was to improve the way in which KYC was undertaken, reducing friction points and improving overall conversion through the funnel. We introduced a new photo ID form, and to further help those have verification issues we are introducing manual KYC processes also.

We’ve also implemented a real-time on-chain affiliate reporting tool, which was a popular request from our current affiliates, a feature that will undoubtedly help with onboarding future affiliates.



During the last three months, we have opened up access to another 27 markets increasing the available player base that FunFair partner casinos have access to. Furthermore, we have assessed and made adjustments to the autocomp feature, to allow tiered bonuses dependent on local markets. This is in an effort to stamp out autocomp abuse, paired with further anti-fraud devices to combat this across the board.



Regular players and followers of FunFair Technologies will be aware of the speed at which the games team have been creating and releasing quality blockchain-based games. Since our last update, there have been a total of five new games added, which will be expanded upon later in the update.

Stepping into Q2, we’ve got a focus shift to the very top of the funnel, marketing, and the very bottom of the funnel, payments.

From a marketing perspective, we’re focusing on big-ticket items like marketing tech. This will further enable us to massively up our game in terms of segmentation and multivariate testing.

We will be aggressively testing new sources of traffic and promotions to try and find new consumer sweet spots.

With regards to payments, UI/UX will form a major focus on improving the usability of the wallet. We’re also adding features like removing gas, integrating Uniswap and adding more educational content. The big news is that we will be announcing and integrating a new fiat to crypto provider soon! We are also looking at further ways we can leverage our wallet, so stay tuned for news on this.

We will, of course, be still ploughing on with our games and many other aspects of the business as well.

That’s my snapshot of Q1 and a teaser into Q2. We’ll now dig a little deeper into each area, starting with commercial;

B2B – Lloyd Purser, COO

From a B2B point of view, Q1 was all about ICE totally gaming and the IGB affiliate events.

To start with ICE we had a solid show with a number of valuable leads coming directly from our relationship with Digital Isle of Man. Two (maybe three!) of those leads have developed further and we continue to explore how we can progress those into deals. From an investment point of view, that’s hands down better than the return we got from ICE 2019, where we spent 10 times as much on the event and came out with a high number of low quality leads to follow up with. So this year was much more focused on quality which I’d say ICE achieved for us.

Following on from ICE the IGB affiliate show was somewhat disappointing, for both affiliate recruitment and whitelabel sales which were the key areas we were pushing commercially. Traffic was visibly lower than usual at the event. We did however sign up a few new affiliates and walked away with some whitelabel leads.

It’s for these reasons that in Q2 we have decided to focus on what we have brand wise and not look to integrate further whitelabels from the affiliate/crypto space right now. Product and development wise we’re focusing all efforts on marketing and payments. We want to realise the benefits this approach brings prior to integrating more brands. We’re also seeing more traction coming from our current whitelabel partners (cryptocasino.com and kingtiger.io) which is great and we want to learn more from these partners prior to pushing for more brands to integrate.

Here’s the video we produced while at ICE, outlining our key objectives and comments from members of the team;

We will continue to evangelise and educate the market, particularly focused on medium to large igaming operators throughout the quarter.

B2C – Tom Leadbetter, Head of Marketing

Last quarter we spent a bit of time introducing processes to better understand our users and allow testing, segmentation and early retention opportunities.

A few examples would include the introduction of early life emails, a revamped referral program, A/B testing of regular newsletters, a network audit, investigations into platforms such as twitch and a marketing stack audit to name just a few focus points.



Early results have been positive with retention emails generating an open rate of over 50% and regular newsletter optimisations delivering 23% more users in just 6 weeks.

However, these processes are a few best practices and customers expect personalisation from marketing.

This quarter will include some significant developments.

We are close to integrating a new marketing services platform which will enable us to segment users in real-time and allow on and off-site testing of messaging, better understand player demographics and behaviours to drive improved acquisition and retention strategies. Ultimately creating a personalised experience for users.

Combined with this marketing platform is an aggressive acquisition strategy.

In our Tier 1 markets, we have created a testing process to understand exactly what type of users each network/partner and platform is driving to analyse, compare and allocate budget.

This process includes identifying not only where potential players are located, but also identifying what resonates with our potential players. Do they like the transparency and fairness of blockchain, will games led, or promotion, or USP messaging entice them into the site.

Further, PPC, SEO and affiliate elements are being expanded as in-house experts look at building out these campaigns and best practices over the quarter. The blog will help provide a cornerstone for improving SEO.

Finally, Japan will initially be affiliate focused as we are aiming to drive more traffic via our best performing channel to date.





Product – Fred Kessler, CPO

As mentioned by Stef and continuing on from Q1, our focus this quarter will be on payments whilst also focusing on improving our overall marketing capabilities. User interface (UI) and user experience (UX) still also sit at the forefront of our agenda, with a considerable amount of effort being applied to further improve the wallet, account pages and customer support and help content.

Payments

During the last quarter, a lot of effort was put into identifying a partner that would give us the ability to provide a FIAT to crypto solution. We’re proud to announce that has been achieved, and we are now working towards delivering that integration. To further streamline funding accounts, we conducted a full review of our payment flows and are taking steps to ensure it is easier and clearer for users. We pushed back on adding more providers during Q1 as we wanted to have a full picture of deposits and payments and have now completed this, and are preparing for development. This will also mean changes to our account pages and some other areas of the website in order to improve the user experience.

Removing gas and the need to hold Ethereum is ongoing and should be live very soon, but we are also doing work on improving the user flow of starting and ending a game session to ensure playing games is as simple as possible.

Marketing

We have been exploring multiple campaigns and promotions on the platform and have identified areas where we feel there is a need to do additional work to remove some of the manual process needed to execute these promotions. This is an important step to better our marketing capabilities, but also to give our players a better experience overall.

We have been making improvements to the content of the CasinoFair website with the addition of a new Blog. This will allow us to keep players updated with the latest in Guaranteed Fair gaming, as well as allowing us to increase our search engine optimisation (SEO). As we step into Q2 you may notice some of our external content being moved to within the platform, such as the referral programme, promotion pages, etc.

We have also identified a new partner to provide the marketing team better targeting, retargeting and CRM capabilities and will be doing the integration during Q2. This work will provide a much higher level of automation but also better value to our future marketing campaigns.

Also in the context of marketing but in a wider view, we are doing research into new features for the platform and games that can provide some new functionalities, allowing us to combine wagering activity with community interactions and promotions. More to come on this as we get a better understanding of the technical requirements and feasibility.

A lot more features are being planned, many related to improving the user experience such as detailed help pages in the wallet flows, but also other features related with the player – through the likes of player profiles, avatars and nicknames.

As always it’s going to be a very busy quarter!

Games – Geoff Scaplehorn

Q1 has seen five new additions to the FunFair games library. These come in the shape of Fun Mountain, Shamrock Riches, Pirate Dice, Five Fruits and Banana Blast, our latest release. Five Fruits is the second title from third-party games developer, Big Wave Gaming.

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As the Games team moves into Q2 the focus is still very much on bringing top-quality, Guaranteed Fair games to players and partner casinos alike. The team are currently exploring three new genres that are sure to pique interest, these will each be bringing a combination of classic maths and fun replayability to the portfolio.

First on the list of new additions is ‘The Getaways’: stash your cash in this top-down retro-esque game, which is sure to be unlike anything you’ve played on the platform so far. The team are also working on further concepts spanning ideas based on the crypto investment space, plus much much more.

Finally, thanks for reading through our Q2 update, we’re really excited about what FunFair and our partners can achieve with the new product features, games and marketing activities planned.

We hope you all stay safe and please do stay tuned for more updates as we progress through the quarter.