Too many products are trying to be everything to everyone, according to Smarkets’ Chief Operating Officer, William Chambers.
Speaking to iGaming Expert ahead of taking part in a panel titled ‘Cross-Platform Consistency: Designing Seamless Mobile, Web & App Experiences’ at SBC Summit in Lisbon, Chambers detailed the two non-negotiables for providing a frictionless customer experience.
He also shared his thoughts on the meteoric rise of prediction markets in the US, including why for the UK it ‘changes everything and nothing at the same time’.
When users move between mobile web, native app and desktop during the same betting journey, where do you see the biggest friction points today?
Too many products are trying to be everything to everyone, everywhere, all at once. The risk is that you end up not really solving any of the customer’s problems fully.
The minimum bar for any customer is a seamless experience that maintains speed and reliability across the critical moments in their betting journey: deposit, bet placement, and withdrawal. Once you get past that, the question is how does your customer want to use your product and what platform best meets their needs.
We rebuilt Smarkets from the ground up this year, so we’ve thought a lot about this. Our key insight is that while you want to be everywhere the customer is, it is most important to understand what problem your product solves for the customer. We have two brands that appeal to different customers who engage in different ways, so we have leaned into that by focusing on the right platform for the experience the customers want to have, while staying true to our central unique value proposition, which is our industry-leading pricing.
Are there experiences that should intentionally differ by platform, rather than striving for complete uniformity across platforms? If so, why do you think that is?
One of our strengths is that our talented product and design team really takes the time to get into the heads of our customers and understand how they want to use the product. About 70% of our SBK customers use Mobile over Web, while on Smarkets it’s pretty much the inverse, and those are reflective of very intentional design decisions to appeal to different niches of customers.
On Smarkets, our customers have more of a financial trading mindset, so they want lots of data on price, on price movement over time, and they want a lot of control over how they trade. Often the price and opportunity are more important to them than the underlying event being traded. This data-rich experience naturally fits better on desktop, so we built Smarkets to be a web-first experience.
On SBK, we simplified the exchange experience by hiding the sell-side prices and presenting the customer with a sportsbook-style interface. These customers still choose us because of our industry-leading prices, but they are sports fans first and foremost. They want that second screen experience, and that product needs to put that at their fingertips, as they have a low tolerance for too much time spent in product when placing a trade.
We could have bundled all these experiences into one product, but that would have diluted the brand identity of each. Instead, what we have is focused on delivering a very specific experience to different customer segments.
How do you develop personalised UX while remaining flexible enough to respond to regulatory changes?
Customers expect a personalised experience as a default. We use personalisation across our homepages and in guiding customers on what to bet on next. With any product feature, including personalisation, we build it with our regulatory environment in mind, so it does not feel like a constraint on how we work. With nearly 20 years of experience in regulated markets, we are pretty good at it now, so for example we built and launched the new Smarkets in just six months.
How has AI changed the way that mobile, web and apps interact as one cohesive product?
AI is definitely going to disrupt and evolve how bettors interact with products. We expect the future of betting to be more narrative-based. The consumer demand for bet builders is an expression of this. Every time you build a bet builder, you are basically constructing a little story in your head about what will and won’t happen on the pitch. What you are seeing now is AI being integrated within existing products, for example, to assist with personalisation or provide a chatbot.
In a few years, I expect we are going to have fully AI-native betting apps where placing a bet becomes more of a conversational experience. On the other hand, bettors like what they know, particularly in mature markets such as the United Kingdom, so I don’t expect to see this change overnight.
How do you prevent platform-specific optimisations from creating a fragmented user experience over time?
Smarkets owns all of its technology stack, so that makes it much easier to deliver a seamless experience. When you are in our product, you are only ever interacting with software built by our engineering teams, which allows us to ensure the quality of the customer’s trading experience stays as high as possible across web and mobile platforms.
What are the biggest challenges facing companies seeking cross-platform consistency?
The non-negotiables are speed and reliability across the critical moments in the customer journey: deposit, bet placement and withdrawal.
Unlike a lot of ecommerce or app-based businesses, betting companies handle customer cash directly, a lot of it. Customers on Smarkets traded £7.6 billion in volume last year, and because we need to match every customer trade with another to be able to accept a bet, that means literally billions of moments we could mess something up. Customer tolerance when it comes to making a mistake with their money is zero.
When our customers log in to the app, or mobile web or desktop, they are always presented with the same level of available account history, details of the trade transactions and, of course, seamless money movement. The companies that can’t do the simple things like this really well are actively losing market share.
How has the rise of prediction markets in the US impacted the perception of betting exchanges in markets such as the UK?
The rise of prediction markets in the US is an exciting development that sort of changes everything and nothing at the same time. One thing that is changing is that we are seeing an increase in interest in our exchange products from consumers, other businesses and, of course, the media. In the category of things that aren’t changing, Smarkets has been offering political and current affairs trades since 2008, so our core product is doing exactly what it needs to already. This is really important as we submitted an application for designation as a DCM and DCO to the CFTC earlier this year.
It has been comforting to see that the product we have operating today is basically the same as what is needed to operate in that space.
So far, the excitement you see around prediction markets in the United States has more about the federal licensing path, which has opened up the giant US market in one go, rather than product innovation. That may change over time, and we can see the new entrants working to expand the breadth of markets they offer. While they have certainly been effective at generating a lot of hype, they have also made some missteps. We have been operating event contracts trading for nearly 20 years in the UK, so we know how to do this in a regulated and sustainable way.
Held in Lisbon from 29 September to 1 October 2026, SBC Summit is one of the world’s largest gatherings of betting and gaming professionals.
The event will bring together 40,000 attendees from across the industry for three days of learning, networking, and discussion, alongside a major exhibition featuring leading brands from around the globe.
For more information and tickets, visit sbcevents.com/sbc-summit.
