888’s mission is to develop state-of-the-art technology and products that provide fun, fair and safe digital gambling products to players globally
Owning and developing its own technology enables 888 to create differentiated products, adapt to regulatory changes effectively, enhance customer safety, and respond quickly to new opportunities. Its product-leadership strategy is central to the company’s growth plans, providing safe, quick, content-rich and entertaining products that can be deployed to millions of customers, driving superior return on investment.
In addition to its technology leadership, 888’s deep data expertise enables rapid data-led decision making, providing highly efficient marketing campaigns, ensuring its players are using its products safely, and providing the right content, to the right customers at the right time.
The Group is structured into two lines of business: B2C, under the 888 brands, and B2B, conducted through Dragonfish, which provides partners a leading platform through which to establish an online gaming presence and monetise their own brands.
888’s business is diversified across multiple products (FY2021)
Product Leadership
Consumer technology businesses, from media and entertainment to travel and banking, are consistently innovating and raising the standards. Customer expectations of what good product and technology looks like constantly evolves, and 888 benchmarks itself against both its direct competitors, and the broader digital entertainment landscape, to ensure a consistently high quality of product.
To achieve product-leadership, 888 has the following product principles:
- Safety: All of 888’s products must, above all else, keep gambling safe and fun
- Usability: Quick, simple and intuitive products
- Content-Rich: Providing the range and breadth of content that customers want
- Entertainment: Using AI and gamification to serve up the right content to the right customers at the right time
- Innovation: Product developments should be driven by incremental improvements, as well as creative new ideas and products
- Scalability: Build once, and deploy across millions of customers to drive superior return on investment
Exciting & Trusted
Online Betting & Gaming Brands
888 owns and operates some of the most exciting and trusted online Casino, Sport, Poker and Bingo brands in the market.
Our Offer
888casino is of the world’s leading casino brands, with a multi-award winning casino experience enjoyed by more than 25 million members. 888casino aims to provide the most enjoyable online experience available by combining exclusive games developed in-house by Section8 alongside branded video slots and ‘live’ Casino games, which offer high-quality video streamed casino games with a range of professional dealers.
In May 2018, the Group launched a new Casino platform, internally called Orbit. This represented the Group’s most exciting new product development of recent years and has been recognised with important and high-profile industry awards.
How we generate revenue
Online casinos replicate the real-life casino experience with players playing against ‘the house’ across online versions of classic casino table games such as roulette and blackjack as well as slot and video games. In these games, the house has a statistical advantage or ‘edge’.
Casino revenue is the difference between the amounts of bets placed by customers, less the amounts returned as winnings.
Our Offer
888sport is an innovative, cutting-edge sports experience. At the heart of the 888sport offer is genuine passion for sport, with thousands of live and pre-event betting markets on offer across hundreds of events, from the obvious to the obscure.
During 2020, 888 began to roll out its own in-house sports betting platform for the first time, following a strategically important acquisition in March 2019, thereby giving 888 complete ownership over an end-to-end sports betting solution.
How we generate revenue
Customers place bets on a variety of events against ‘the house’, at different odds which are determined by 888sport. The group attempts to set odds such that there is built-in theoretical margin into each set of odds and each market, which over the long term delivers a fairly stable betting win margin, but given the variance and unpredictability in sporting results, this can be volatile in the short term.
Sport revenue is the difference between the amounts of bets placed by customers, less the amounts returned as winnings.
Our Offer
888poker offers a leading poker environment that enables players of all abilities to enjoy the games of their choice whether on mobile or desktop. 888poker offers Texas Hold’em, Omaha Hi’Lo, 7 Card Stud and other poker variations in Pot Limit, Fixed Limit and No Limit formats.
During 2020, 888 rolled out its all-new Poker8 product, providing a cutting-edge, mobile portrait interface to enjoy poker any time and anywhere.
How we generate revenue
In online poker, the operator acts as the virtual host for the game and provides a platform that enables customers to play various forms of poker against each other. Poker revenue represents the commission (or ‘rake’) charged from each poker hand in ring games, and entry fees for participation in Poker tournaments.
Our Offer
888’s bingo brands each have engaging themes, a variety of games and a strong sense of community, replicating the experience of traditional bingo halls. The Group’s bingo brands also benefit from an extensive range of 888-developed slot games, casino games and scratch cards that are offered alongside traditional bingo formats.
888’s portfolio of brands includes 888ladies, Costa Bingo and Wink Bingo.
How we generate revenue
As with traditional bingo halls, online bingo rooms offer customers the chance of winning prizes by purchasing tickets and playing their bingo format of choice.
Bingo online gaming revenue is represented by the difference between the amounts of tickets purchased by customers less amounts won.
Strategy for
Continued Growth
888’s mission is to develop state-of-the-art technology and products that provide fun, fair and safe digital gambling products to players globally
888’s growth strategy is based on four key pillars:
Market focus
888 has rapidly grown its presence in regulated markets with great success, but we must ensure we invest our resources in the markets with the most attractive opportunities, where we can deliver superior returns. In order to do this, we have built a sophisticated framework that gives us a clear understanding of the addressable market opportunities to guide focus on clear market archetypes and generate sustainable growth. Our market archetypes are:
- Core markets
- Growth markets
- Long-term investment markets
- Optimisation markets
Sustainable competitive advantages
888’s long-term success is built around its core capabilities, developed and refined over its long history, that have created strong sources of sustainable competitive advantage:
Product and content leadership: Our proprietary technology across all products provides a clear strategic advantage over our competitors and enables full flexibility over the user experience. Our focus on clear product development principles allows us to offer best-in-class products, differentiated content, and AI powered personalisation
World class brands: The 888 brand is one of the global industry leaders, and amongst the most recognised gaming brands in our core markets. We harness the power of our world-renowned brand, together with our highly effective, automated, and flexible data-driven marketing machine, to acquire, retain and engage customers in a unique way
Customer excellence: Understanding customer needs, and building our product, marketing and offers to create the best experiences possible underpins our growth plans. We are also investing in providing excellent customer service. In doing all of this we also use technology as a force for good and focus on creating the safest possible gambling experience
Value-enhancing M&A
888 has a structured and systematic approach to M&A activity, focusing its efforts on delivering long-term value creation by building leading positions in the most attractive end markets.
Our acquisition of William Hill will deliver a step change in scale and significantly accelerate progress against our strategy.
Made for the Future
Our strategy is underpinned by robust corporate governance and a clear ESG framework, Made for the Future.
Market focus
888 has rapidly grown its presence in regulated markets with great success, but we must ensure we invest our resources in the markets with the most attractive opportunities, where we can deliver superior returns. In order to do this, we have built a sophisticated framework that gives us a clear understanding of the addressable market opportunities to guide focus on clear market archetypes and generate sustainable growth. Our market archetypes are:
- Core markets
- Growth markets
- Long-term investment markets
- Optimisation markets
Sustainable competitive advantages
888’s long-term success is built around its core capabilities, developed and refined over its long history, that have created strong sources of sustainable competitive advantage:
Product and content leadership: Our proprietary technology across all products provides a clear strategic advantage over our competitors and enables full flexibility over the user experience. Our focus on clear product development principles allows us to offer best-in-class products, differentiated content, and AI powered personalisation
World class brands: The 888 brand is one of the global industry leaders, and amongst the most recognised gaming brands in our core markets. We harness the power of our world-renowned brand, together with our highly effective, automated, and flexible data-driven marketing machine, to acquire, retain and engage customers in a unique way
Customer excellence: Understanding customer needs, and building our product, marketing and offers to create the best experiences possible underpins our growth plans. We are also investing in providing excellent customer service. In doing all of this we also use technology as a force for good and focus on creating the safest possible gambling experience
Value-enhancing M&A
888 has a structured and systematic approach to M&A activity, focusing its efforts on delivering long-term value creation by building leading positions in the most attractive end markets.
Our acquisition of William Hill will deliver a step change in scale and significantly accelerate progress against our strategy.
At the fore of global
online betting and gaming since 1997
888 has been at the forefront of the online gaming industry since the company’s foundation in 1997, providing to players and B2B partners an always innovative and world-class online gaming experience.
Despite ongoing COVID-19 disruption, we achieved record results and continued strong operational progress in line with our refined long-term corporate strategy. This included further expansion across regulated markets, the continued delivery of our product leadership plan, a step-change in our US growth strategy through the launch of SI Sportsbook, and the announcement of our proposed transformational acquisition of William Hill.
We also launched our more ambitious ESG framework called 'Made for the Future'. This creates a clearer blueprint to support the Group’s ambitions to be one of the top performing and most trusted operators in the global betting and gaming industry, building on the Group’s investments in recent years to improve in safer gambling, increase employee diversity, support local communities, and reduce the Group’s environmental impact. We also formalised our carbon reduction target, to achieve net zero direct emissions by 2030 and across our entire operations by 2035.
In the US, alongside launching SI Sportsbook in Colorado, we secured our sports betting license in Virginia. Meanwhile, in Europe, we also secured our sports betting license in Germany and launched 888sport in the market on a locally regulated basis.
2020 will be remembered as the year that the Covid-19 pandemic wreaked a terrible human cost and disrupted businesses and communities across the world. Against this challenging backdrop, 888 quickly adapted to new ways of working and maintained its relentless focus on product innovation and safe gambling.
The Group successfully delivered a number of cutting-edge new product developments during the year including launching its proprietary Sports betting product for the first time; rolling out Poker8, an exciting new poker platform; and developing and launching the Control Centre, a new customer-facing interface to ensure that safe gambling will always be front and centre of the 888-user experience.
Towards the end of 2020, 888 was also pleased to announce the signing of three multi-year market access agreements to launch in the U.S. states of Colorado, Indiana and Iowa initially with the 888Sport brand during 2021.
Itai Pazner was appointed as CEO, to continue to deliver 888’s growth strategy. 888 continued to expand geographically with the launch of its brands in the regulated Swedish and Portuguese markets.
In February 2019, the Group acquired a portfolio of bingo brands, including Costa Bingo
In March 2019, the Group was delighted to announce the exciting acquisition of the sportsbook technology alongside associated risk management, product and trading capabilities previously behind the BetBright brand. This acquisition gave 888 complete ownership over technology and product development across four key online betting verticals for the first time.
888’s continued product innovation in Casino was recognised with two major industry awards: the EGR Casino Operator of the Year and Gaming Intelligence Casino Operator of the YearJet bingo acquisition
888 announced the strategic acquisition of the remaining 53% interest in the All American Poker Network, a joint venture established in 2013, and rolled out the first interstate poker liquidity network. The acquisition represented an important strategic milestone to facilitate the Group’s future growth strategy in the US. This followed the launch of 888Sport in the state of New Jersey in September 2018, marking 888’s first sports betting offer in the regulated US market.
During 2018, 888 commenced the roll-out of its cutting-edge Orbit Casino platform that would go on to enjoy tremendous success across multiple markets.
Board of Directors
Jon Mendelsohn was appointed as Chair of the Board in March 2021. He is a highly experienced gambling sector professional with more than 20 years' industry experience that includes co-founding Oakvale Capital LLP, a leading M&A and strategic advisory boutique focusing on the gaming, gambling and sports sectors. He co-founded LLM Communications, a corporate and public affairs consultancy which was acquired by Financial Dynamics to create one of the largest global financial and business communications companies. He served as a Managing Director and later as Chairman of the Global Issues Division, including after it was acquired by FTI Consulting. He is also an investor in early stage and start-up companies in areas ranging from digital marketing, post-production and fusion energy. Jon is a Labour life peer who has sat in the House of Lords since October 2013 and sits on the International Relations and Defence Committee.
Anne de Kerckhove is currently the CEO of Freespee - a fast growing company in the conversational commerce space. Previously, she was the CEO of Iron Capital and the Managing Director EMEA for Videology, Global Director of Reed Elsevier, and COO and International Managing Director at Inspired Gaming Group. She is also an angel investor and mentor for early-stage start-ups and entrepreneurial funds including CRE and Daphni. She holds a Bachelor of Commerce from McGill University and an MBA from INSEAD.
Itai was appointed as CEO of the Company in November 2017 and as CEO in January 2019. He was appointed to the Board in March 2019. He has worked for the Group since 2001, initially launching the 888.com brand in the UK and positioning 888.com as a top 3 UK online gaming operator. Other roles included Global Offline Marketing Director, Senior Vice President Head of EMEA, Senior Vice President of Casino B2C, Senior Vice President Head of B2C and COO. Prior to joining the Group, Itai held managerial positions at Internet Gold, a leading ISP. He graduated from the College of Management Academic Studies and holds a diploma in corporate finance from the London Business School.
Yariv Dafna was appointed as CFO of the Company and joined the Board on 1 November 2020. He previously held a number of positions with Telit Communications plc since 2003, taking an active role in its IPO in 2005 and subsequent fundraisings. His positions at Telit included Group CFO from 2007 to 2012, Chief Corporate Development Officer with responsibility for all M&A activity, and subsequently also COO, with responsibility for all operation and purchasing activities. In 2017, he rejoined the Telit’s Board as Finance Director with responsibility for finance, legal, IT, IR and corporate development activities. Yariv started his career in 1999 at Deloitte Israel. He is a Certified Public Accountant and holds an MBA from Tel-Aviv University and a BA in Business Administration from the College of Management Academic Studies.
Mark Summerfield is a Chartered Accountant and worked for KPMG in the UK and US for 29 years, 18 as a partner. His roles included Global Head of Gaming, UK Head of Audit for Technology, Media and Telecoms (“TMT”) and UK Head of Assurance. Mark has extensive knowledge and experience in auditing, financial reporting and governance, as well as mergers and acquisitions and capital market transactions. Mark spent most of his career working for companies in the TMT and leisure sectors and built KPMG’s gaming practice, working with a number of online gaming operators. He was also William Hill Plc’s interim CFO for 15 months, helping set the group’s strategic direction and assisting with its transformation and technology programmes.
Limor Ganot is Managing Partner of Gefen Capital, a US-Israeli venture capital fund that invests in disruptive technologies, a member of the global advisory board of Diners Club International, a board member of Diners Club Israel, and former co-CEO of Alon Blue Square Israel. She is a certified CPA who started her professional journey in the corporate finance division at KPMG, and received her Bachelors of Science in Accounting and Economics from Tel Aviv University.
Board Committees
The Board of Directors of 888 (the Board) has established five committees: an audit committee, a nominations committee, a remuneration committee, an ESG Committee, and a Gaming Compliance Committee. From time to time, separate committees may be set up by the Board to consider particular issues when the need arises.
The Audit Committee assists the Board in discharging its responsibilities with regard to financial reporting, external and internal audits and controls, including reviewing 888’s annual financial statements, considering the scope of annual audit and the extent of non-audit work undertaken by external Auditors, approving 888’s internal audit programme, advising on the appointment of external Auditors and reviewing the effectiveness of internal control systems.
The UK Corporate Governance Code recommends that all members of the Audit Committee should be Non-executive Directors, all of whom are independent in character and judgement and free from relationships or circumstances which are likely to affect, or could appear to affect, their judgement and that at least one member should have recent and relevant financial experience. The Audit Committee comprises three Independent Non-executive Directors: Mark Summerfield (Chair), Anne de Kerckhove and Limor Ganot. Normally, by invitation, the Chief Financial Officer and Internal Auditor attend Committee meetings, as can representatives of the external Auditors.
Terms of Reference
The Nominations Committee assists the Board in discharging its responsibilities relating to the composition of the Board. The Nominations Committee is responsible for reviewing, from time to time, the structure of the Board, determining succession plans for the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and identifying and recommending suitable candidates for appointment as Directors.
The Code recommends that a majority of the Nominations Committee should be Non-executive Directors independent in character and judgement and free from relationships or circumstances which are likely to affect, or could appear to affect, their judgement.
The Nominations Committee presently comprises independent Non-executive Directors Anne de Kerckhove (Chair) and Mark Summerfield.
Terms of Reference
The Remuneration Committee assists the Board in determining its responsibilities in relation to remuneration, including making recommendations to the Board on 888's policy on executive remuneration, determining the individual remuneration and benefits of each of the Executive Directors and recommending and monitoring the remuneration of senior management below Board level. The remuneration report and remuneration policy generated by the Remuneration Committee is put to an advisory vote of 888's shareholders annually at the Annual General Meeting of 888.
The Code recommends that all members of the Remuneration Committee should be Non-executive Directors, all of whom are independent in character and judgement and free from relationships or circumstances which are likely to affect, or could affect, their judgement.
The Company's Remuneration Committee presently comprises three Independent Non-executive Directors: Anne de Kerckhove (Chair), Mark Summerfield and Limor Ganot.
Terms of Reference
The Board has appointed an Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) Committee. Its members are Jon Mendelsohn (Chair), Anne de Kerckhove and Mark Summerfield. The Committee will provide Board-level oversight of 888’s ESG strategy, targets and progress against key performance indicators. Responsibilities of the Committee include safer gambling, suitability of business relationships, business ethics, diversity, the Company's relationship with its stakeholders, the environment and climate change.
Terms of Reference
In accordance with Nevada Gaming Control Board requirements, the Board has appointed a Gaming Compliance Committee. Its members are Michael Alonso (an external consultant to the Company) (Chair), Yariv Dafna and Mark Summerfield. The Gaming Compliance Committee is entrusted with making sure that the 888 Group’s licenced gaming activity is carried out with honesty and integrity, in accordance with high moral, legal and ethical standards, and free from criminal and corruptive elements. As such, the committee is responsible and has the power to identify and evaluate situations arising in the course of the Company’s and its Affiliates’ business that may adversely affect the objectives of gaming control. The Committee is not intended to displace the Board or the Company’s executive officers with decision-making authority but is intended to serve as an advisory body to better ensure that the Company’s goals of avoiding unsuitable situations and in entering into relationships exclusively with suitable persons. The Committee’s work is being done independently and impartially. To this end, its members are appointed by and report directly to the Board of Directors.
Terms of Reference
Terms of Reference
