Catching up with SBC Media during SBC Summit North America, Managing Partner at Eurobets Erick Caceres shared his thoughts on the state of the horse race betting sector.
“The highlights for me, being from the horse racing space, is the chat I had with Bill Pascrell and Dennis Drazin from the Monmouth Racetrack, where they were discussing the big question – whether a fixed bets on horse racing versus party mutual model will be the saviour of horse racing wagering,” said Caceres.
He continued by stating that he’s “not sure that it needs a saviour”. For him, “at the very least a fixed model will attract a new punter of a younger demographic that’s already doing fixed bets with other sports books. That’s pretty much it.”
In addition to the drawbacks that horse race betting is currently facing, Eurobets’ Managing Partner pointed out that the sport is “lagging a little bit on the technology side”.
“As you can see here at SBC there’s maybe one vendor that’s a Tote provider. We want to change that. We want to implement as much tech as possible, and increase the user experience – everything that has to do with data.
“I think that data management is almost non-existent in the industry on the user side, and even on the event side. Once we do that it’s going to open the world to us.”
Caceres is also looking to grow horse racing in the Dominican Republic, which is “a small island with approximately 12 million population, of which under a million are traditional horse racing fans”. To outline the small size of the market, Caceres mentioned that there’s only one racetrack, with the sport having dwindled more to the legacy side over the last decade.
“What we’re doing is a two-fold strategy, we’re repositioning the way these traditional horse racing fans can bet and what they have access to. For example, our main product is the PMU French races which were not available in the Dominican Republic before, and we’re doing that through two verticals.
“We’re doing the online platform which also didn’t exist in the Dominican Republic, and through a retail partner network. And on the other side of that – the other 4 plus million that we know play the lottery daily or bet on other sportsbooks, we want to attract some of that public.
“We are designing curated events around most of the important races throughout the year where we’re doing the dress-ups, the big hats, the cocktail-driven events. We’re doing all of that in the Dominican Republic which hadn’t existed since probably the 1930s and 40s, thus bringing back that status the sport used to have back in those days.”
When asked about Eurobets’ plans for expansion, Caceres added: “Expansion is going to be more focused on the US for now. It is having an exponential growth right now, and some parts of the pandemic have benefitted the online gaming industry, so we want to be a part of that game.”
