Giovanni Bertoli, Co-Founder and CEO of Wall Street Football, talks about the rise of the company to becoming one of the betting market’s leading brands and how a ‘startup mentality’ has been instrumental in helping it be more creative, responsive and innovative. 

Wall Street Football’s stated mission is to develop technologies that valorize data at the intersection of sport analytics, sports media and entertainment and gaming. A couple of years ago, Wall Street Football and Tradinglab co-founded WSF ODDS. Can you tell us more about this joint venture?

In Wall Street Football we understood that to fully get a leadership position in the betting market, great technology was not enough, we needed to combine that with a more in-depth expertise of the dynamics of the betting industry. Here it comes, Tradinglab: a company with 12 years of experience in the betting industry and the largest trading department in Italy. 

Two years ago we decided to put together the tech capacity of WSF with Tradinglab’s deep expertise in the betting industry and huge know-how in trading odds. From this joint venture was born WSF ODDS: a company fully specialised in player props and other live innovative betting markets, which quickly became the leader for live player props, operating currently in more than 40 countries in the world. 

Let’s unpack exactly what WSF ODDS brings to the marketplace. What are your key products and services?

We make it possible to bet on every stat of the game, pre-match and live. Users can enjoy betting on many performance indicators such as number of shots, number of passes, offsides and many other stats both at a single-player level and at a team and match level.

In other words, while you watch your favourite team playing you can bet real time on whether your team will shoot on target more or less than the opponent team, or whether your favourite footballer will score with a header, or whether he will complete more than a certain number of passes. 

We offer bookmakers odds feeds and settlement feeds pre-match, live and post-match, betstops tailored on these specific products and a specific trader dashboard to trade these markets and customise the offer. 

You’re currently focused entirely on football, but have revealed aspirations to introduce tennis and basketball into your portfolio. What are the main challenges you are facing in integrating these sports and in what way do you intend to differentiate them from competing products that are already live in the marketplace?

The main challenge is to make good deals with monopolistic official data owners.

Differentiation for competitors comes probably from our narrow specialisation on props markets. This allows us to have superior quality of the odds, faster settlement and betstops and the widest offer in terms of competitions and market types covered. 

Also we have a startup mentality and this makes us more reactive to clients needs, faster in the design and development of innovative products, and more dedicated to great customer support. Delighting clients is our first priority. 

One of the big emerging markets on everyone’s lips is LatAm. How is Wall Street Football’s presence shaping up there and what are your plans for growth in this exciting part of the world?

We already offer player, team and match props for most of the LatAm football competitions. Our odds are already being used in some LatAm countries and we are observing how these countries are reactive to innovation and to player props markets, with turnover growing on a monthly basis. We believe that focusing on this part of the world is key for our growth and we hope SBC can support us in achieving this goal.

You spoke at the recent SBC Summit Lisbon. Can you highlight some of the topics you addressed with delegates? 

At the summit we talked about the rise of player props in football, giving concrete and numeric insights regarding the turnover and the margin performance of props markets pre-match and live. Nowadays everyone knows that these markets exist and everyone feels they are kind of cool, but having been on product with live, team and match props for more than two years I think we have a wide and deep visibility that nobody has on the matter. 

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