2021 was an exciting year of metamorphosis for Finnplay. This year the torch was passed from our founder Martin Prantner and co-owners Sari Aitokallio and Erkki Nikunen to Finnplay's new Managing Director, Jaakko Soininen and a new generation of leadership in the company. The year featured the usual impressive list of new products, markets and a renewed focus on the company’s core strengths – compliance, technology and service. However, the most strategically impactful event occurred when Finnplay was acquired by the Baltic’s leading B2C operator, Enlabs and subsequently became a part of the Entain group of companies.
For years leading up to the sale, Finnplay had been diligently refining its strategy and narrowing the focus towards our core expertise in the areas of technological compliance and regulated markets. Under the new umbrella of the Entain Group, Finnplay made the final transition to becoming an exclusive supplier of B2B platform technology and services to regulated markets. Commitment to this strategy obviously comes at a cost and limits growth in certain directions. However, this clarity of direction streamlines our efforts in all aspects of the business including development, resource planning, sales & marketing, strategic planning and prioritization. It is also consistent with our values – both internally and externally, and in line with the overall trend in the industry towards increasing regulation and responsibility towards players.
In spite of all the distractions that come from a change of ownership and strategic direction, the Finnplay team still managed to deliver another stellar performance this year on many fronts. Here are just some of the highlights from 2021 worthy of recognition!
Industry recognition
February 26, Finnplay wins the prestigeous EGR Nordics Award for the best Casino Platform Supplier. Finnplay was chosen from a list of other top tier providers including Playtech, Scietific Games, Relax, NetEnt and Microgaming.
In November, Finnplay has been shortlisted again for the prestigious award to be given out in February 2022 in Malta.
New Markets
The Netherlands
Without a doubt, Finnplay’s success in the opening of the Dutch market was a highlight of the year. With only 10 licences granted by the KSA from 28 applications, Finnplay succeeded with both operators it supported to win 20% of the licenses in the first tranche. In October, Finnplay launched two brands in The Netherlands:
October 6, Batavia Casino was the third live brand with Finnplay from operator Play North. Their entrance to the Dutch market has been a booming success with continued growth seen month after month since the launch.
October 8, Fair Play Casino is operated by FPO Nederland BV (part of the Janshen-Hahnraths Group). JH-Group is a strong player in the Dutch slot machine industry with over 60 years of expertise. They are best known for operating more than 30 Fair Play Casinos across the country.
Lithuania
On May 26, Finnplay officially entered the Lithuanian market with 7 Bet. The launch came only 5 months after signing the cooperation with operator Amber Gaming and followed an impressive push to achieve platform compliancy in market.
It was one of the largest projects Finnplay’s team had ever delivered, as the site included all the different product verticals from Casino to Sportsbook. It also required the integration of special features such as Idenfy (Identification tool), Offline betting terminals and Opay payments to have a competitive product ready for the Lithuanian online gaming market.
New products
Mobile App
In 2019 it has been estimated the 50% of online bets were made on mobile devices. That trend only continues to grow and along with it the demand from operators for further optimisation of the mobile gaming experience. Finnplay set about making its own mobile app platform for iGaming operators in partnership with Mexican operator Playdoit. The product was officially launched on August 11th. It’s a sleek, modern and fast native application that can integrate all the available games, payments and other third-party providers. It was built using Google’s Flutter technology and is approved for distribution on the Apple store for iPhones and Google Play for Android devices.
FinnSafe
One of the most challenging aspects of entering new markets is developing customized tools for regulatory compliance. The Dutch technical regulations required a special Control Data Bank reporting tool. In October, Finnplay officially introduced its bespoke regulatory reporting tool FinnSafe as part of the opening of the Dutch market. The tool needed to transmit critical real-time data such as registrations and game / payment transactions to a dedicated server delivering specific reports to the regulating authority (KSA). In the future, the architecture of this tool can be tweaked to suit other markets such as Denmark, Spain and Switzerland who have similar CDB requirements.
More new brands!
February 11, Cashpot launches its online version of the land-based casinos operating in Craiova and other cities in Romania. Cashpot runs on the Titan® platform, using their own frontend.
October 1, Finnplay launched a new site with Hungarian operator Vipcasino.hu. The Vipcasino.hu brand was an exciting new entrant to the market, bringing a focus on high-value players looking for a genuine VIP experience online.
Technology
Titan® technology continues to grow in power and capability under the direction of CTO Yang Meng. This year our operators put Titan to the test with some serious demand on performance:
- Peak demand - on a single operator during World Cup Soccer overtime match, Titan® supported over 2000 concurrent online players
- A new record was achieved with over 155 million game rounds per month on a single site
The team also pushed hard to deliver 12 platform releases with over 600 stories and features. The continuous improvement of the platform is driven by our operators' needs and regulatory requirements. Our commitment going forward is to push even harder with platform development efforts to ensure Titan® outpaces the competition as the best-in-class platform for regulated markets.
Customer Support
Following the successful launch of the 360 services department in 2020, this year was a process of refinement under the new leadership of Teemu Pesonen. Among the many impressive improvements, this year’s performance includes:
- 99% of all the incoming tickets resolved within SLA
- 81% of the incoming tickets resolved within first contact (FCR)
- 58% of the incoming tickets resolved within 5 hours
Quality Assurance
Our QA team lead by Selina Guo continued to build more efficiency and automation in our QA processes. Some impressive results reported by the QA team include:
- Total executed cases 40828
- Total issues found 3757
- New added testing points 9623
- Total automated cases 722
Games Department
The Games team led by Liliya Alenina further developed the game platform in numerous directions, including performance, reporting, game management, gamification and offline betting:
New Master Game file
A major performance improvement was accomplished in the handling of the game portfolio. The Master Game list was halved in size by merging the Desktop and Mobile instances of the same game. This increased the speed of automatic game additions to the sites from 20 to 10 minutes per site. It made work with the files faster for both Finnplay and operators and lightened the frontend development needed to display the games on the site.
Enhanced game reports.
Game reports were enhanced with the Player device information. Now it is possible to analyse the site traffic based on the players device (Desktop, Mobile phone, Tablet or Mobile Application)
Game Management improvement in the Back Office
- Search by supplier within an Aggregator is introduced, making it easier to find the needed games.
- Two new columns are introduced (RTP and Launch Id) which makes it easier to identify which game is available for your market.
- Customisable view for columns is introduced so operators can work with the specific information they are interested in.
Offline betting
Offline bettering now enabled to allow betting in physical terminals
Gamification tools!
First gamification tools are introduced into Titan platform for Live casino and Bingo
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Looking towards 2022
These highlights are just a fraction of the improvements to Finnplay’s technology made by our team during the year over the course of 12 platform releases encompassing more than 600 stories / features. Looking forward to 2022, Finnplay has already developed an ambitious development Roadmap with a continued focus on performance improvement, strengthening our technological compliance, improving our back office, making our offering even more competitive and adding more new features and products. Here is a list of some of the exciting things our team will be working on this year:
- AI tools for Responsible Gaming
- Microservices
- Enhanced reporting tools
- Back Office UX
- Game management
If you are interested to learn more about all the exciting things ahead in 2022, don't hesitate contact us.
Thank you to the entire Finnplay team for an outstanding performance in 2021, and we look forward to even more success in the year ahead!
