Inside Metric: Q&A with Matt Edwards

Could you give a quick bio of yourself and the experience you have had in the sports betting/gambling industry?

I joined the industry over 20 years ago with what was then called Victor Chandler working initially on casino and poker products. We rode the poker boom to become one of the biggest online poker rooms in the world, which was a lot of fun. Eventually I moved into working across sports too and ended up designing a US Racing betting product for the UK market. I had a stint leading the design function at Unibet (now Kindred) before making a brief move out of the industry as Creative Director for Experian in the UK, working on consumer products used by millions of people every month. Most recently I was in charge of the digital product and customer experience at Fitzdares, a small UK bookmaker serving a premium, higher-staking client base.

What are your passions outside of work?

I have two children under 7 so I don't get much time for hobbies but we all love working in the garden. Like many men of my age, I've swapped my golf clubs for a bicycle (well, two bicycles) and you can often find me thrashing round the lanes of Surrey or up on the Army training areas in Hampshire.

What made you decide to join Metric Gaming?

Almost my entire career has been dedicated to bringing the best possible sports betting experience to the player. When I was shown that Metric are building a completely new type of platform and importantly that I'd have the chance to use that platform to shape an incredible and completely configurable UX -  I really couldn't say no.

What are the main responsibilities of your role at Metric Gaming?

The biggest part of my job is helping ensure we implement new features and functionality in a way that ensures players find them easy to use, efficient, and that they deliver value for our sportsbook partners. Sometimes this is on the player-side and sometimes it's for our back-office users. I'm involved in working with new and potential partners to understand their markets and strategy and to identify the best way Metric can meet their goals.

Finally I work with our stakeholders across the business to help prioritise the most valuable initiatives by understanding their goals.

In your area of expertise what is the most prevalent problem that operators are currently facing?

From my experience, I’ve seen most operators on legacy sportsbook platforms quickly get frustrated by

1. The glacial pace of improvement in the platform that their players can benefit from and
2. The inability to craft an experience that meets the expectations of their players, back-office users, and the strategy of the business.

From your perspective what part of the Metric offering is most important to overcoming these challenges/improving the efficiency of sportsbooks?

Our platform has been designed from the ground-up to support multiple experiences across our sportsbook partners. Not only could we easily, and quickly build a different banner carousel, navigation or betslip for a single partner without impacting any other sportsbook on our platform, but we encourage that to happen.

When it comes to velocity of improvements, we have a really strong roadmap of change, driven by our product team who have experience in some of the biggest operators, to make improvements across all parts of the platform - improvements that will deliver real value for players and, ultimately the bottom lines of all the sportsbooks on the Metric platform.

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