Badashvili also explained some of the difficulties that women executives have to face in the gaming industry and how they are trying to help the new generations. What do you think about the relocation of ICE from London to Barcelona and what were your objectives during the trade-show?
It was a quite good move. At ICE Barcelona 2025, I was mainly searching to have conversations with platform providers because they are our partners and also for the affiliates. I wanted to get to know them and to understand with whom we’re working. I also wanted to know whether there are some new solutions in terms of payment providers that have more acceptance rates.
You have a lot of experience in the industry having worked with operators and providers. In your opinion, how has the industry evolved and what challenges the market has had to face in the last years?
The industry it’s definitely changing. It’s changing for both the licensed and non-licensed casinos, especially in non-licensed casinos there are lots of changes in terms of regulations. The requirements from the regulators are getting stricter and you have to find the proper ways how to retain the users that you have on your platform and specially in terms of the acquisition because mostly this business is dependent on the traffic acquisition and then the retention.
What is changing the most actually, it’s like people are getting more constricted when having to solve a problem. I know lots of companies who are concentrating on small problems, and they are not seeing the big picture. For me, now the most important thing is to see the big picture and understand where the industry is moving to.
Also there have been some changes in the terms of the data. There are lots of companies that are looking into machine learning and analysis of data. The companies that will get bigger and bigger will be the ones that understand that now it’s the time to explore deeper in terms of data analysis and to have prediction models to understand whether the users are going to churn or not, to see whether they are going to have a good lifetime value or not.
Would you share some advice for the young women that are trying to enter the industry?
My experience has been quite challenging. Unfortunately, I can’t say that the industry has full equality but if you compare it to the previous periods, even two years ago, it is a bit different. I don’t mean that there are no women who are in the market, they are present, but in higher positions you don’t see that many women.
The good thing is that we’re creating communities where we can share our experiences and these spaces tend to spread information about either our success stories or our failures. I believe this communication and having these communities will help a lot.
Right now, you are working on a new project. What details can you share with our readers and what are the biggest challenges you are facing?
This is quite a new project. It’s been on the market for one year, actually. We are planning to work in Canada, Australia, and Germany. We’re also investing a lot in Ireland because it’s has quite good users. The markets where we will look probably in the nearest future are going to be the United Kingdom, Netherlands, and France. But for now, we’re definitely concentrating on the markets that we know that they are working and they have good results.
One of the challenges is related to the recruitment process. Finding the right people is very challenging, especially in some positions like in marketing and CRM because there are not so many people with experience and the ones who are working within the industry, they are not very interested in moving to other companies. Also, there is another related problem that there are people who are very well experienced, but they are moving from one company to another every three months.
One more thing is on the traffic side. There is also a kind of problem there because the cost of acquisition is increasing a lot because of the restrictions from regulators, because they are blocking the accounts of affiliates, so now the importance of retaining the users is much more higher. This is the biggest challenge.
