In this interview, with Leonid Matison, Head of Customer Success, Casino & Sportsbook at EvenBetGaming
we explore how a customer-first approach has become a key competitive advantage in the rapidly evolving iGaming industry. The conversation highlights the importance of delivering more than technology by providing operators with expert guidance, strategic consulting, and hands-on support to ensure successful launches and long-term business growth.
In EvenBet Gaming’s recent launch announcement, you highlighted a massive portfolio of over 15,000 games from 230+ providers. For a newcomer entering the market, this volume can be overwhelming. How does the Customer Success team help operators curate the ideal initial content mix tailored to their specific target regions?
Well, obviously nobody would expect to run that amount of content on a single project, nor is it realistically possible. Different providers are available in different markets under varying conditions, and that is exactly the point.
With a library as vast as ours, we can always curate a tailored list of providers that perfectly matches the operator’s specific needs and target audience. Furthermore, each operator is assigned a personal account manager who carefully builds an optimized package for the initial launch and continues to expand it throughout the project’s lifecycle.
It was mentioned that the modular platform has been engineered to “remove the complexities typically associated with launching a casino”. In your opinion, what are the three main operational complexities clients face most often, and how does your team eliminate them?
The first and main complexity would be trying to manage different business facets consistently and in alignment. Our product combines numerous operations into one unified back-office, allowing operators to run user management, content management, affiliate structures, and much more all in one space.
Secondly, new projects often face the burden of needing a competent and relatively large technical team. Here, we take a significant part of the load off their shoulders by managing the infrastructure and technical support ourselves, letting operators focus purely on business-related tasks.
The third challenge is finding growth potential beyond simply increasing traffic volumes. As a Customer Success department, we constantly align ourselves with our customers’ long-term goals and ambitions for each individual project, always striving to offer the strategic guidance and options needed to help the operator scale.
With a realistic time-to-market starting from just 1–2 months, the launch process is remarkably swift. Based on your experience, what internal bottlenecks on the operator’s side usually slow things down, and how does your CS team act as a project manager to keep the launch on track?
From our experience, many operators, especially smaller ones, tend to get bogged down by trying to ‘min-max’ their project right from the get-go. They constantly change launch requirements and content specs, ultimately falling victim to scope creep.
Instead, a much more viable approach is keeping your launch scope clean, lean, and mean starting with a soft launch and then steadily expanding your volume as you grow.
The launch materials introduce the concept of a “two-way conversion pipeline” between casino and poker. What specific engagement metrics and KPIs do you recommend operators monitor to evaluate how effectively players are migrating between these two verticals?
Besides obvious metrics like rake and GGR? There are a number of ways to track the effectiveness of your endeavors, and it all depends entirely on the goals you set. What conversion percentage are you aiming for? What tools are you using to achieve it?
For example, if you are running a cross-selling promo campaign where a poker player opts in and gets rewarded with casino free spins, you can track the performance closely. You should check how popular the promo is, how many people actually opt in, how many use the reward, and whether they continue playing afterwards. You always start with the goal and the tools, and that is what should define your metrics.
Offering a massive ecosystem of over 15,000 games allows operators to build a highly diverse offering. From a Customer Success perspective, how does having access to such a scalable and flexible content portfolio directly drive player retention, and what is the business value for an operator in being able to dynamically configure their game mix as their player base grows?
Obviously, if you don’t have top-rated content for your target market, you’ll have to get very creative to make players stick to your project. However, sheer numbers are not the be-all and end-all answer to retention.
As I mentioned before, the core idea behind a large library is flexibility and robustness. The casino market is highly turbulent and constantly shifting due to regulatory restrictions or changing trends. Your project needs to adapt to all of these changes on the fly, giving you the ability to rotate content and swiftly introduce options your player base will enjoy. We never integrate providers just to chase high numbers, instead, we carefully select all content to continuously improve our ability to create engaging projects.
Operating on a single player account with a shared balance is a powerful user retention feature, but it requires solid backend logic. Do operators frequently require specialized assistance when configuring risk management or bonus settings for this seamless transition, and how does your team guide them?
In terms of the cross-vertical operations you mentioned, it is actually easier than it sounds if you are using our platform. We track all relevant player events in real time within our back-office, so there is always a clear way to see how your project is performing.
As for the configuration itself, frankly speaking, given the wide variety of tools and options we provide, new operators usually need our team’s help to set things up initially, be it promo campaigns, anti-fraud checks, or something else. We are more than glad to provide this hands-on support. Additionally, we offer extensive online documentation and a vigilant support team, which in the long run helps operators build their own expertise with our product and run things smoothly.
Your turnkey solution comes with an all-in-one operational stack and KYC tools. What is the business value for a newcomer in having the team guide them through these configurations, and how does this hands-on support ensure the casino is fully secure and ready to generate revenue from day one?
Well, the business value of being secure and compliant is self-explanatory: you simply cannot operate without it. Depending on the specific compliance conditions, it can be quite challenging to keep everything in check while simultaneously getting to know a completely new platform.
That is why we always make sure to thoroughly understand the operator’s challenges in that department right during the discovery phase, before any contract is even signed. This allows us to fully comprehend the entire scope of our responsibilities from day one.
EvenBet’s extensive 20-year history in poker implies a world-class expertise in fraud prevention and anti-collusion. Have these strict security standards been adapted to protect the new casino vertical, and how does your team train inexperienced operators to spot and handle bonus abusers?
Handling casino promo abusers is highly dependent on the promo settings themselves. Luckily, our internal bonus engine is equipped with a wide array of tools designed to achieve just that. Depending on the project, we can be very specific about how a bonus is granted, who receives it, and how it must be wagered. This precise configuration, combined with daily monitoring by the operator’s promotional team, is more than enough to ensure clean and healthy bonus economics.
In the press release it was emphasized that this new casino platform runs on the exact same high-load, production-proven infrastructure used for your Tier-1 poker clients. Does this mean that a startup choosing your pre-configured starter pack receives the identical level of SLA, uptime guarantees, and dedicated support as a global enterprise?
Of course, a support SLA should always be a uniform concept, much like gravity or the conservation of energy. After all, any project that is down is obviously not successful, and as a Customer Success team, we simply cannot have that!
Payment infrastructure and monetization are the absolute lifelines for any casino operator. How does EvenBet Gaming’s pre-integrated pool of solutions solve the initial banking hurdles for newcomers, and how does your team assist operators in optimizing their payment routing to maximize deposit success rates?
Integrating a new payment solution (PSP) from scratch can be a lengthy process, depending heavily on the provider’s API quality, documentation, and technical support. Making your launch dependent on such a volatile variable can be highly costly, especially if you already have strict timelines and marketing plans in place.
Using an infrastructure that has already proven its worth and mettle is both better and more cost-effective in 99% of cases. To facilitate this, we have a dedicated integrations team that helps operators select, configure, and optimize the ideal payment coverage for their target markets.
Going live is just day one. What does the post-launch growth and consulting strategy look like from your point of view, especially when helping non-technical startups design their first effective bonus campaigns and retention workflows?
Well, it usually starts with a simple question: ‘What is your goal for year one?’ That major, overarching milestone can then be broken down into smaller, actionable stages per quarter, for example.
Together with the operator, we build a comprehensive roadmap to guide them moving forward. We try to cover all possible bases here: from promotional and bonus campaigns to content library expansion, as well as identifying the specific features and optimization tools needed along the way.
For a non-technical entrepreneur or startup, managing player retention, VIP levels, and reinvestment strategies can be daunting. How does EvenBet Gaming’s built-in bonus engine simplify day-to-day operations while giving operators the tools they need to drive consistent GGR growth?
Player retention, and especially VIP handling, is a major undertaking for many startups. It definitely requires more than just mechanical tools from a platform; it demands a dedicated person or even a team to manage it daily.
Still, robust automation never hurts, and that is exactly what we provide. With the ability to run highly precise bonus campaigns, allowing operators to stop, edit, and restart them on the fly while tracking results in real time, operators gain all the essential tools they need to successfully plan and execute their desired bonus strategies.
Many platforms claim to be “startup-friendly”, but they leave newcomers to navigate the competitive iGaming market alone. What makes EvenBet’s guided launch model a true competitive advantage for a startup compared to standard, hands-off white-label or turnkey competitors?
Regardless of how others choose to run their businesses, we prefer to stick to our own ideals and vision. This means that our customers are, in a very real sense, our partners. We don’t say this just because it’s a common buzzword. We genuinely view it that way.
Consequently, our greatest competitive advantage is our unrelenting drive to launch our customers successfully, providing any guidance or hands-on help they need. While more mature and seasoned operators might already have a prepared team, plan, and vision, we are fully ready to sit down with newcomers, work through every detail on their roadmap to success, and walk that entire path together.
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