Rob Fell

iGaming History, Episode 3 Transcript

​

Narcis Gavrilescu: Hello, everyone. Welcome back. This is iGaming History episode three. I'm joined today by Rob Fell, which I very fondly say about Rob, CEO of RiskCherry. Rob, absolute pleasure to have you here today.

 

Rob Fell: Thank you very much for having me. An honor to be invited. Very much look forward to chatting about my career and what we're doing with RiskCherry. So thank you very much.

 

Narcis Gavrilescu: Rob, the honor is mine. Before we go into details, for anybody who doesn't know you yet, which is surprising, to be honest, can you tell us a little bit about you?

​

Rob Fell: I have been in the iGaming and gambling space for over fifteen years. I started at Paddy Power. Then I moved to Gibraltar, spent time with Gala Coral, with Lottoland, joined the GVC group when they were acquiring many businesses, moved on to NetEnt, spent time at WhiteHat Gaming, WhiteHat Studios, and have been involved with RiskCherry for the last four years. I've seen everything from the B2B side, the B2C side, the service supplier side, and done a bit of everything.

 

Narcis Gavrilescu: Very rich experience. Rob, you are the only person in iGaming I know who has a military background. How does a man who once wore British army uniform end up in this place?

 

Rob Fell: There is actually a community of people who've served in the military, not just the British. We have a network and help each other. I left the British Army during the global financial crisis in 2008. I didn't know what I was doing. I came from an officer background in leadership roles, working with communication and intelligence.

 

Moving into an IT and technical role was clear. I went into product and operations roles. I saw an article in Computer Weekly with the then CTO of Paddy Power saying they were growing the tech team from 140 to 400 people. LinkedIn was new. I messaged him. We had a chat. I found a guy I went to school with who was working for Paddy Power on the bingo team. I messaged him, we talked, I met his boss, and everything happened very quickly.

 

Within a week, I had a role at Paddy Power in the bingo team. It was a coincidental entry through connections and early networking, which I've used since. An odd journey, but going from leadership in products and technology into consulting and gaming made sense.

 

Narcis Gavrilescu: When you joined Paddy Power, what did the industry look like from the inside? Is there anything that struck you immediately?

 

Rob Fell: I joined the bingo team. Up until that point, I had never placed a bet in a betting shop, never placed a sports bet, never gambled online. It was a whole new world. I joined prior to UK Gambling Commission regulations. We were live in the UK with an island bingo product. The online division was called 'non-retail'. We were begging, stealing, and borrowing developers and BI analysts from other teams. It was a small community building the online product.

 

It was all new, figuring out stuff as you went. I taught myself SQL. We logged into servers in Ireland and used Hyperion BRIO to pull reports on daily trading activity. We allowed customers to type any mobile number on a reg form. We'd write SQL queries to get mobile numbers to manually upload into primitive SMS tools. It was very much a 'figure out as you go' and learn everything. It was the wild west back then. As we go through this conversation, we'll talk about regulation coming in and how things changed. Joining, it was teach yourself and adapt.

 

Narcis Gavrilescu: Do you remember the first time you thought, "this is it, I am in the right place"?

 

Rob Fell: There are a number of examples, but one thing that captured me and stuck with me was about a month or two into my role. Discussions around player protection, modeling responsible gambling behavior, and markers of harm weren't happening back in 2011. I came into the office one morning, and we were massively up.

 

Our monthly GTR was €42,000, and in one day we saw €20,000. It was a red flag. A couple of us on the team dug into it. There was a lady who had deposited on a debit card, added another bank account, then moved to a credit card. We looked at this and said this isn't right. LinkedIn was in its infancy. We searched for her, found her business via Companies House. She was a child minder, a nanny in a small town in the southwest of the UK, which isn't affluent. We looked at each other and said this is wrong.

 

We made a decision as a business to refund her deposits, cancel the credit cards, and the VIP manager called her to say we think you're playing beyond your means. This was way ahead of regulators and these discussions. I'm sure other responsible businesses had similar things, but we led this. As a bingo operations exec with peers, we decided to do this. I thought then, this is where I want to be. We're doing the right thing. Yes, we offer entertainment, we want people to deposit and play, but we are doing the right thing. That mindset has stuck with me regarding compliance, regulation, KYC.

 

That was the first point I thought I'm in the right place, surrounded by good people who want to do right by the customer without a regulator telling us.

 

Narcis Gavrilescu: You've seen the industry grow for almost twenty years. Did we lose anything along the way? Did we lose this?

 

Rob Fell: To some degree, we have lost this. I can't speak for all businesses. I've been privileged to work in small teams within large organizations and in growing teams. What I've seen we've lost is that back then, at Paddy Power, it was five or six of us in London. We'd look at each other and decide to put something live that day.

 

We'd write marketing copy. I'd log on at 6 AM on a Saturday, pull data using Hyperion BRIO, segment it manually, send half to a colleague to upload, and send a marketing campaign to the base. The VIP manager would get a list of customers to talk to. We were really agile, dynamic, flexible. As entities like Flutter, Entain, Betsson Group, etc., have grown, you've added layers of bureaucracy to match layers of regulation and the complexity of working in many regulated markets with segmentation and automation.

 

That agility and ability to drive numbers daily in the right direction while doing the right thing, I think we've lost that as the industry scaled. It was highly agile then, able to influence numbers quickly and positively, and it's much harder now.

 

Narcis Gavrilescu: Is there any way for us to go back?

 

Rob Fell: The use of AI and tool sets developed now will help us get back to that. I genuinely think many organizations are too bloated, with too many people, too many layers, managers managing managers. If we remove some layers and go back to first principles, and people interact with tools that do this, we can push and deploy within the constraints we have now, which are right. We can be much more agile.

 

Narcis Gavrilescu: Do you think there's willingness to do this?

 

Rob Fell: From some people within an organization, absolutely. Looking at the gambling industry versus other sectors, there are similarities. With the rise of AI-native businesses and businesses using AI, we'll have a bottom layer of people straight from college who are inquisitive, using ChatGPT, Claude, building agentic bits, doing side projects. You'll have the top level of shareholders and some C-suite who think they understand it and want to buy in because it delivers more value. But then you have a fat middle layer, what an old school friend calls the 'frozen middle'. All these layers of management are not incentivized to do this. As long as targets are hit, they don't want the bother of implementing new stuff. They don't want the risk of roles becoming redundant. They want a nice easy life. Unless we break that and the frozen middle is unfrozen, we're stuck. AI-native businesses that believe in this and deliver will succeed. Those left with the frozen middle will die off, be acquired, or not operate anymore. I see that across all sectors; the gambling industry is no different.

 

Narcis Gavrilescu: You've been in high-level positions for some time with a proven track record of excellent leadership. If you could go back ten years to when you first stepped into an executive role, what advice would you give yourself?

 

Rob Fell: I wouldn't give business leadership advice directly. I fell into the trap of thinking I needed to work every hour, that work-life balance was unnecessary. I neglected myself for many years. I've spoken on other podcasts and been vocal on LinkedIn about my transformation over the last two years. My advice would be: be kind to yourself.

 

Give yourself time to keep fitness up, not eat rubbish food, not drink alcohol every night, not feel you need to go to every party, dinner, event at every show and be out till 4 AM. I could have been a much better manager, leader, more successful if I hadn't gone to the excesses of working hours, dinners, drinking. You need balance. Anyone moving into a leadership role or starting a business: yes, there are huge pressures, you need to work hard, there will be long hours.

 

But block your calendar for an hour and a half every second day to go to the gym. Walk to the office. Drink water. Get nutrition right. Get a coach if needed. Focus on yourself, and the work results will become much better, and you'll be a better person. That's the advice I'd give myself.

 

Narcis Gavrilescu: I agree wholeheartedly. I've been in that situation: working 24/7, weekends, terrible food, poor shape, with a fog in your head. I got a personal trainer a couple of months ago, and you feel like a new man.

 

Rob Fell: 100%. It's a totally different lifestyle.

 

Narcis Gavrilescu: Could you go through what you think have been the most important chapters in your previous roles and what you learned from them?

 

Rob Fell: I've been fortunate to work for some of the largest organizations in the gambling sector in Europe and the US. I've been through many changes, on the buy side or sell side of M&A. At GVC (now Entain), I learned about the speed at which you can plan, implement, and execute platform migrations, deliver synergies, and rationalize teams sensibly. When one large organization acquires another, how do you map them together to drive growth for shareholders and the business forward, doing the right things without instantly making 2,000 people redundant? Do it sensibly to ensure a sustainable business and support the right people.

 

GVC acquired various businesses, migrating sports platforms, the Ladbrokes Coral acquisition, side acquisitions of Cozy and Crystal Bet. It was about how these businesses and people complement each other. Yes, there were casualties over time, but everything was done properly. I learned a lot from how people planned and thought, delivering product, technology, and operations to make everything come together.

I then worked for NetEnt.

 

We acquired Red Tiger, and then we were acquired by Evolution. Prior to the Evolution acquisition, NetEnt went through huge changes. The NetEnt group was built for something that previously existed and was bloated. It taught me the most about going through painful times of making people redundant and rationalizing teams. No matter your level, it's a terrible, tough time. For me as a manager and leader, those times taught me how to do these things. Sometimes they are necessary as markets change. It taught me how to interact with people, not just from HR, legal, and finance perspectives, but from a personal relationship standpoint. Restructuring is painful, but I learned a lot. I've taken that into building our current organization: how to build in a lean, scalable way so we don't become bloated and never need to be in that position again.

 

To generalize, two things I learned are: One, be authentic. Be yourself. I don't have a version of Rob at an event, at home, or in the office. I am just Rob. Whether on LinkedIn, talking to you, or a new hire, I'm just me. Be authentic. Two, always be available. I learned this as a product manager. My role was to always be available to the development team and business stakeholders. Be available at all times to your team. If someone asks a question, give a quick thirty-second answer on Slack or Google Chat. Always be available. Those two things have underpinned my career.

 

Narcis Gavrilescu: Can't it get overwhelming? So many people depend on you.

 

Rob Fell: I don't find it does. I'm one of those people who feels uneasy with one unread message on Slack, Google Meet, or one unread email. As soon as something comes in, I respond immediately, no matter when or what it is. That's while still giving myself time to go to bed early and spend time with family. I hate unread messages. If someone messages me, I want to get back. If asked a question, I want to at least say I'll answer tomorrow. I don't let it overwhelm me. I'd much rather be on top of everything, available and able to chat.

 

Narcis Gavrilescu: My next question was about leadership, but you expressed a lot in the previous answer. Maybe if I ask you, does leadership style change on the operator side versus now, in a regulated testing lab?

 

Rob Fell: I don't think the leadership style needs to change at all. There are different skill sets you learn and adapt to, different stakeholders internal and external to manage. Your communication style may change with those. But the leadership style doesn't need to. I was very lucky to go from school and doing A-levels in the UK into the British Army officer training academy, learning leadership and management from a very early age. The things I learned there and adapted when I moved into the business world have stuck with me. My leadership and management style has been pretty consistent, evolving and growing, but with the same core principles underpinning it the whole time. Some things will obviously change whether you're a B2B game supplier, an affiliate, an operator, or running a test lab, but the common thread will still be running through it.

 

Narcis Gavrilescu: I appreciate the consistency and the transparency. Many people say that's missing in the industry, so we're very fortunate to have you here.

 

Rob Fell: I don't think I'm the only one. I think we have some very good people in this industry with the right mindset.

 

Narcis Gavrilescu: When you look at your whole time dedicated to iGaming, are there any key moments on the timeline that pop up where you think, "this changed the industry, this changed the trajectory, this is where things made us work differently"?

 

Rob Fell: Yes. I could talk about regulation, technology, product, people, M&A, and cycles of all these things. What underpins a lot of that within the iGaming bit? A lot happens on the sports betting side, with regulation post-UIGEA, New Jersey going live, other US states, the UK, Italy, other European markets regulating, then LATAM. I wanted to bring us back to product, as I spend a lot of my time in products and operations.

 

When I joined the industry, we were still in the world of downloadable casinos. Someone would have to go on a desktop, get an EXE file, and download a Playtech casino from Gala Casino or wherever, then download all the games individually. That was the norm. Very quickly after that, we went into native apps for everything.

 

We went into a multi-app strategy where every brand had multiple apps: William Hill Vegas, Sky Vegas, William Hill Casino, Paddy Power had Roller Casino, Paddy Power Games, Paddy Power Casino, Paddy Power Bingo. Every organization had ten apps in the App Store. For a player, that's massively confusing and stupid. At the same time, we were talking about 'mobile first'. This was phase two: native and mobile first together.

 

'Mobile first' meant designers with 27-inch screens designing for mobile but still building stuff as a desktop site you then shrink down. Then we went into responsive design. Phase two was this level of product, from a download casino to this fake mobile first. People were talking about this; I remember the old CEO of LeoVegas saying "this is the year of mobile." Then the next year, someone at ICE would say "this is the year of mobile." We went through that period. We learned a lot about how to serve something better to a player, but we didn't quite get it right.

 

Then we went into the death of Flash and the migration to HTML5. This gave game studios and casinos the point where you could use frameworks and libraries, and things could become more lightweight. At that point, we really started to have portrait games on mobile that are HTML, a casino lobby that quickly interacts, and we could start to add layers of interaction. It wasn't just a player coming to the front page, placing a sports bet, getting cross-sold to casino, tilting their phone to landscape for a game, then going back to sports bet. The third phase was moving into mobile first with HTML games, building proper experiences.

​

The fourth bit, and I still think as an industry we're rubbish at this, is personalization. Some great companies are bolting stuff on, doing the data and building solutions. Phase four was finally moving from one-size-fits-all, where a player in the UK, Germany, or Sweden logging into a site sees the same thing as everyone else, to one size doesn't fit all, to varying degrees of success. Personalization came in. I think now we're moving into the AI world where we can leverage tools to do these things in real-time properly.

 

We've gone from a downloadable EXE file on the casino, to getting a bit better with multi-app strategy, to building proper mobile products, to adding personalization. I think now we're in a place where we can bring all of that together and deliver it a lot better. That's my journey over the last fifteen years in iGaming.

 

Narcis Gavrilescu: Do you think the product is ready, or does it need to keep evolving?

 

Rob Fell: It needs to keep evolving and will keep evolving. If I compare the iGaming space and casino front pages to wider ecommerce, this has been my bugbear for ten years. I still believe many brands, though some are starting to do well, are way behind wider ecommerce in how we serve content to customers, how we segment, personalize, and use real-time data to make decisions and give the right experience a player wants on the front end. I still think we are way behind other ecommerce and could do a lot more as an industry. There are reasons why, and we're probably gonna talk about those. There's a reason why these things haven't progressed to the level they could be.

 

Narcis Gavrilescu: Before we jump into this, regulation is important and everybody talks about it. Do you think there was any point when regulation went from protecting the player to literally the enemy of innovation?

 

Rob Fell: I have a mixed answer. Having seen things from B2C, B2B, and now my current role, I have a good oversight of the requirements put on an operator, a game supplier, and a test lab. I don't think there's been one point. There have been inconsistencies in how different regulators adopted different standards. Some of it is, brutally honest, a lack of understanding. Some regulators wanted to rush things through to generate taxes, and taxes may be a higher priority than player protection, hiding under a 'player protection' guise to push things through. In those instances, civil servants in ministries of finance or justice, or newly formed regulatory bodies, copy a bit of the UK, a bit of Italy, look at New Jersey, put it all together hoping it makes sense because they don't understand it. That has happened.

​

Some regulators have done a really good job, building sensible frameworks and consulting with various parts of the industry. If you look at the layers of player protection, market empowerment, and ensuring players aren't gambling beyond their means, if you average it out, I think a quite good job has been done. There's room for improvement with many, but the enemy of innovation has been the fact that most regulated markets happened sequentially. There was the UK, then Italy, then other Western European countries, then New Jersey in 2013, then Pennsylvania, Michigan.

 

There's been a constant stream of these markets with varying degrees of 'you need to do this, you need to do that'. This means every operator and game supplier must focus their teams—front-end portal teams, KYC, fraud, risk teams, payments—on changing to support new regulatory requirements. All these elements that form a B2C platform, all the bits around a game supplier supporting different regulatory requirements, mean you're constantly, as a leader, scraping all your dev resource and operational bits to enter a new market. You never have a dev team free to do anything apart from adopt new regulation.

 

There's nothing wrong with the new regulations; it's a constant flow. Then the UK updates RTS or LCCP. Perfect. But there's never a free gap. As a business, whether B2C or B2B, you must decide: do I outsource this, bring in a new dev team, increase my cost to support entering new regulated markets AND innovating, personalizing, bringing in AI tools, and reacting to affiliation not being allowed in a market? It's a trade-off, a constant prioritization call. Unfortunately, as a sector, we have let the innovation, the personalization, the player experience on the entertainment front be neglected because we've all been doing those bits to support entering new markets and changes to existing markets.

 

Narcis Gavrilescu: This is where RiskCherry comes in.

 

Rob Fell: To some degree. There's a much wider part to this, but we definitely come in to help with some of these parts.

 

Narcis Gavrilescu: Tell us exactly what problems you're solving and for who.

 

Rob Fell: My background has been across many B2C and B2B organizations. A lot of the core team also worked in game studios. As a game studio, I interacted with and was the client of many test houses. I put many products through certification and audit for up to 30 regulated markets. We looked at it and thought some do a better job than others, but as a test lab that truly understands what a game studio is doing and why, there isn't a great match. That was the starting position.

 

We said as a game studio, we could do this better. We could look at it from a technology perspective and ask, how do we build systems to test, inspect, certify, and audit iGaming content, platforms, RGSs, and integrations in the best possible way within the realms of ISO accreditation and regulatory needs? How do we do that? Then, flipping it around, we understand the game studio side really well. We've built hundreds of games for 25-30 regulated markets. How do we build a system that supports game studios? How do we cut out all the wasted effort and time? How do we build an intuitive solution for them?

​

We are solving the problem of how to build something highly efficient for a game studio to come in, place an order, get their content or platform certified, inspected, and signed off against all regulatory standards in the simplest possible way, while meeting all requirements and our obligatory ISO needs. How do we build something as streamlined as possible?

 

Narcis Gavrilescu: One interesting concept you talk about is 'certification made simple', but red tape in the industry doesn't make it simple. Is there a way, a process, you can tell us about how you make this philosophy real without giving away trade secrets?

 

Rob Fell: In the past, game studios' development, QA, and compliance resources were eaten up answering questions via email, getting Excel sheets, or PDF exports of bugs from a test lab every couple of days. We asked, how do we simplify this while ensuring everything is audited, certified, and inspected correctly? That's where we came in. We said we're experts on one thing and understand the other. How do we bring it together and build the right solution that supports people now? It's about leveraging tooling, technology, and our experience to map all these things together.

​

'Certification made simple' is not just something we say to our clients. I learned at Paddy Power that if you want to be seen as a fun entertainment company to a player, you need that environment and mindset in the office. So, with 'certification made simple', when our teams in Malta, Bulgaria, etc., are doing their daily work, every task we do, we think: is this as simple as possible for the client? Within the realms of accreditation, ISOs, and standards, am I making this as easy as we possibly can? If the answer is no, we think how to make it better, how to simplify it. Also, when someone is doing their job, they ask, am I doing this in the simplest possible way? Could I make this simpler?

 

This creates a mindset internally of always looking to incrementally improve processes, systems, tooling, and documentation. It's the sum of all parts of us continually looking at what we do, never being happy with today being the same as tomorrow. We have that mindset. We're continually evolving, building new tools. I'm constantly talking about releasing new features to our client-facing portal, new AI tool assistance internally. That's what 'certification made simple' is about: how do we make something better consistently and consistently change that? That's what we're all about.

 

Narcis Gavrilescu: Looking back at all your time with RiskCherry up until this point, what do you feel has been the greatest accomplishment?

 

Rob Fell: There are three. One is the speed at which the team got the initial ISO accreditations and started to become an operational business. The second was obtaining our UK Gambling Commission test house approval in 2023, which came very quickly after we became operational. That was a catalyst for a lot of growth. The third was getting our accreditation and approval in Brazil. This year, that has allowed us to expand massively, onboard a vast number of new clients, and support a wider range of markets.

 

For me, it's all about market access and getting those markets. There are another couple of core key markets we're about to tick off, and hopefully those will be the catalyst for the next step change. But getting live in the UK and Brazil are definitely the top things for this business so far.

 

Narcis Gavrilescu: If a player were to look at all the requirements to certify just one game, what do you think would surprise them most?

 

Rob Fell: I think most people within a casino operator, or non-technical people in a game studio, would be as surprised as a player. The level to which a game is tested and inspected—whether by RiskCherry or our competitors—the degree to which the source code is analyzed, the maths is checked, the number of millions, hundreds of millions, or billions of spins put through those games by the studio and the laboratory to ensure the stated RTPs are hit, the level to which player protection and controls are checked, the levels we look at game rules, help files, pay tables to ensure when symbols land, what happens, the probability, the hit rate, etc.

 

I think players, especially, would be very surprised, but also many in game studios and casino operators. Some markets have hundreds of test cases per game, requiring in-depth looks at the backend, the maths, simulated rounds, and all front-end checks. When doing this across twenty-five regulated markets, all with different standards and requirements mapping to different test cases... How we've done it is we've mapped all these together. We say this requirement in the UK is the same as in Ontario or Brazil, though markets express it differently. There are many similarities, then a delta for market-specific player protection, a different focus on IT security, or change management. People would be really surprised at the level every test house looks at this, which every game studio must adhere to. It's a very in-depth process, and I don't think many people understand what it means to certify a game.

 

Narcis Gavrilescu: Based on that, I think we might have a future episode on it.

 

Rob Fell: Deal. Happy to do it.

 

Narcis Gavrilescu: How would you like to be remembered in iGaming history?

 

Rob Fell: I would love to be seen as someone who helped a number of businesses scale. I would like to be remembered as someone trusted within the sector, who was authentic and available, with all the leadership things I talked about. I want to leave this industry, whenever that is—I've tried once before and got dragged back in; you can never leave—but if I do, I would love to be seen as someone leaving it in a better place than I found it. That is the thing I really want to be seen as.

 

Narcis Gavrilescu: I am convinced, based on the work you're doing now, that is going to be the case.

 

Rob Fell: Thank you.

 

Narcis Gavrilescu: Rob, it has been an absolute pleasure having you. Thank you for dedicating your time. To everybody watching, thank you. We will leave Rob's details in the description. Stay tuned for more from iGaming History. Thank you very much.

​

Rob Fell: Thank you.

​