Simon Temple on Bet Builders: Speed, Cashout, and Risk
- Kevin Jones
- Sep 2
- 6 min read
The Bet Builder has rapidly shifted from a niche feature to a core battleground in the sportsbook experience, with operators racing to differentiate through speed, depth, and usability. As player expectations evolve beyond traditional bet slips, the challenge lies not just in user interface design but in the data models, system architecture, and operational safeguards that underpin the product. To explore these complexities, Gaming Eminence sat down with Simon Temple, Chief Operations Officer of Abelson to discuss what it really takes to deliver a “player-first” Bet Builder from UX design and in-play integration to scalability across global jurisdictions and the delicate balance between user freedom and risk management.
Gaming Eminence: The Bet Builder space is becoming increasingly competitive, with bet365 and others making moves in a similar direction. From your perspective, what are the biggest technical and operational challenges in delivering a genuinely player-first Bet Builder experience — and how do these differ from traditional bet slip functionality?
Simon Temple: "While the player-first approach doesn’t present any specific issues technically or operationally, there are design challenges involved in striving to be as appealing as possible to players. This then leads to the technical development of the front end that customers interact with. Building a bet is inherently more complex than placing a series of quick-fire single bets within in-play, for example.
This means that a lot of thought goes into how we can optimise Bet Builder UX and UI to make it approachable and simple, while minimising the time a customer needs to spend building the bets themselves. The number of additional markets that customers can use within Bet Builder products is increasing in line with demand, particularly across player statistics, meaning that more reliable data is needed to power this. In adding another layer of content for customers to navigate, extra care is needed to make the design as simple and appealing as possible. We have built our front-end using player ‘cards’, where all the possible options for a single player are within a single ‘card’. The idea is that this should enable those customers who are particularly interested in building a player-based bet builder to do so.
Operationally, there are challenges in the decision-making process of customers placing multiple bets with potentially high payout liabilities. Again, though, this is a general consideration, not specific to being player-first."
Gaming Eminence: User interface often gets the spotlight, but a Bet Builder’s effectiveness is just as dependent on its underlying data models and pricing logic. What architectural or data-handling decisions have the biggest impact on accuracy, latency, and the range of markets that can be offered?
ST: "Technically, the complexity of the maths which underpins whichever sport is being provided has differing levels of challenge for developers to deal with. Obviously, some sports are more complex to model, with the more complex model also being more complex in code. Offering lots of markets - an increasing number of markets are being added within Bet Builders all the time - does require some future-proofing in the technical design. That is both in the sense of making the code as easy as possible to insert new maths for these new markets, but also to ensure the overall system can handle increased data processing to offer more content.
If the Bet Builder is using a sportsbook’s inputs, as ours does, either in-house or via a third party, there needs to be consideration and technical design to ensure this passing of data has the lowest possible latency. The benefit of using sportsbook inputs lies in gaining a level of consistency, which we believe is key to the experience. That is especially the case when considering player-first and keeping things such as player naming conventions the same as the underlying sportsbook’s.
Architecturally, we have created our Bet Builder so that we run each client as a separate instance and on scalable systems. This ensures that no operators impact each other because they are independent, and that the scalable nature of our systems ensure they can increase, and then decrease, capacity in line with the activity of the operator they support."
Gaming Eminence: The global sportsbook market brings vastly different regulatory, cultural, and sporting contexts. How do you design a Bet Builder that scales across jurisdictions without compromising speed, compliance, or localisation needs?
ST: "It comes down mainly to ensuring that the content within Bet Builder complies with the local jurisdiction and its regulations. We have dealt with this by having the ability to manage each instance separately, and therefore, we can handle localised requirements without needing to compromise the wider network we support. All the technical benefits we believe we've enabled, such as speed, stability and quality, are therefore not compromised."
Gaming Eminence: In-play betting integration is often seen as the next frontier for Bet Builders. What are the unique technical hurdles in enabling real-time market creation and settlement in a Bet Builder environment?
ST: "We believe in-play is hugely important, and a large part of that importance is in being able to offer cashout. A Bet Builder selection is a multiple bet, and we know how much customers want the opportunity to cashout on a multiple, in addition to the operator's own reasons for encouraging cashout. As we are designed to use the client's data, including aspects such as suspensions, we mirror the uptime of in-play in Bet Builder. Technically, a lot of consideration here is in the system design to handle increased data processing across in-play. There are more odds moves and more event data to process. Offering cashout has a large consideration in terms of how often this call needs to be made to let customers know that cashout is available, or not. Settlement is another layer of this, and it needs to be completed in as close to real-time as possible to give players their winnings. Another reason we chose to run each client as a separate instance was to mitigate the large quantities of data by handling them independently."
Gaming Eminence: Looking beyond the current feature set, where do you see Bet Builders evolving over the next three to five years? Could we reach a point where player-driven market creation becomes as standard as pre-match odds, and what would it take to get there?
ST: "We are developing a new type of Bet Builder product, which will be released later this year. We feel it brings something completely new and that customers will really enjoy using it for soccer Bet Builders. Beyond that, we believe the other way Bet Builders are likely to change is that, as customers get more used to them and consider them part of the furniture of a sportsbook, they may well stop being a product feature in themselves and simply become part of the ‘normal’ event display. By that, we mean that adding more than one selection within the same event to the betslip recognises it as a Bet Builder, and treats it as such for the customer. We also support this method, as well as the product feature of Bet Builder, by having our Bet Builder odds available as a feed. We present the client with the opportunity to offer Bet Builder within the ‘normal’ event, either instead of as a feature, or in addition."
Gaming Eminence: Building something “player-first” can sometimes conflict with operational realities such as risk management and margin protection. How do you approach that balance between user freedom and sportsbook safeguard?
ST: "The biggest fear some risk management teams have had with Bet Builders is the large odds, and liabilities, which are built up. While there is a large element of margin protection, these liabilities clearly still exist. There's been a bit of catch-up in terms of the visibility of these risks in operator back offices. That naturally adds to the known risk if visibility does not exist, or is not full. We provide every detail of the Bet Builder bet to our clients, which enables them to assign liabilities as they see fit for their business and platform to get this visibility.
By using client input expectancy values within our maths to provide Bet Builder odds, we also stay close to the trading and risk management decisions being made by the client. If the client is moving the expectancy odds because of a trading decision, then our Bet Builder model will move in that same direction and provide the same security to the trading team.
We also offer the ability for clients to specify their margins for Bet Builder bets, as well as the cash-out margin. This provides a way to enhance confidence for those risk teams by knowing the margin can be adjusted as desired. We are also extending that margin to be applied at the competition level. If some areas of the offering are seen as higher risk, the margin can be adjusted to a level that the client believes is appropriate, or even removed from Bet Builder betting entirely."
