There’s a shift in the casino industry to cloud-based applications – and OPTX, a data platform, is positioned to take advantage of it.
The Las Vegas-based company has tribal and commercial casino customers across the U.S. and continues to expand its reach, especially as casinos heed lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic and seek greater innovation.
Casinos have a number of systems, from a traditional slot accounting system to a player tracking system, food and beverage data, hotel data, bingo, keno and the ancillary systems, according to Brooke Fiumara, OPTX’s co-CEO. “There’s no shortage of new systems coming online like race and sports, which is growing across the country along with online and social gaming,” Fiumara said. “All of the survey data of customers – all of these touch points – are in different systems. What OPTX does is connect to all these systems, both the legacy systems and those newer online systems. We pull all the data together into a single view and operationalize it. We provide features and functionality for slots, marketing and player development.”
For each one of those core areas, OPTX has an artificial intelligence component that links in and makes recommendations of what to do, when to do it or who to do it with, said Fiumara. OPTX’s player development product makes recommendations on who you should contact and why. It makes recommendations to provide an offer to a player that the model thinks will generate incremental profits for the property, she added.
In the slot area, Fiumara explained that OPTX makes recommendations on the slot games that should be swapped out or should have adjustments made. On the marketing side, OPTX makes recommendations on customers that should be part of a campaign or moved down or out of a campaign. It’s totally optimized to make the most amount of profit on any individual campaign a property is running, she noted.
“There’s a lot of BI (Business Intelligence) tools out there and Business Intelligence is part of what we do, but we take it a step further and allow operators to take action through our features and functionality, whether that’s contacting a customer directly or whether that’s using a messaging channel for delivery,” Fiumara said. “It may be delivering an email or text message to a customer or trigger a push notification through the property’s consumer-facing mobile app.”
Fiumara believes that what’s great about their product is that it was designed for both small and large operations. Many smaller properties think a system like “ours is out of reach – that it’s too expensive or not something that they have the time to adopt. What’s awesome about our product is it’s not overly expensive, that even small properties can afford a tool like this to take their operations to the next level.”
Fiumara reported that they’re seeing a shift in the industry to cloud-based applications for a number of reasons – scalability, reliability and security. When looking at the casino industry and some of the more recent hacks that have happened, it’s all been with on-premise applications, systems and servers, she added.
“Five years ago, cloud-based solutions were less accepted,” she said. “Casinos were more likely to not want their data leaving the property and want to keep all of their data onsite. But that has several challenges and costs, security, and scalability to come along with it. With a tool like OPTX being a cloud-based application, one of the things we are seeing is more IT departments and properties not only open to it but welcoming of cloud-based applications. It speaks to the need for the industry to continue to advance and become more technology focused, which is fantastic.”
Fiumara sees innovation as being more important now than ever because not only does it continue to grow, but casinos are competing and fighting for every entertainment dollar. Having a system where you can truly understand your customer, what motivates them and what their preferences are so you can create a better guest experience has always been important, she said.
“Its importance continues to grow as these new systems and new types of gaming are introduced like race and sports and online gaming.”.
The Global Gaming Expo was a great show for OPTX, and it showed that operators are learning the traditional way of thinking that more machines equals more money isn’t always true, said Fiumara. Instead, she contends, it’s all about product mix and making sure you have the right machines in the right place for the right players, and that’s what OPTX helps operators do.
In the industry today there are slot teams making decisions, but they are based on all the slot data they have access to, Fiumara said. There are marketing teams and player development teams making marketing strategy and initiatives based just on the marketing side of the data, she continued.
“With OPTX, all of it is brought into a single platform and slots can seamlessly navigate into the player side of the business and who is playing those machines and what types of machines other players like that they want to play,” she explained. “Marketing is connected to all of the slot data as well, so they can see what their best players like to play and can create better marketing strategies and around that.”
One of the biggest things that makes OPTX different, Fiumara pointed out, is not only does it have the insight to the analytics and business development side of the platform, but it has operational functionality and artificial intelligence models that can make recommendations.
“That is unique and it’s all-in-one,” she said. “There’s a lot of tools out there that do one component of OPTX, but there are no tools that bring all into one view where these different departments can operate seamlessly in a single platform.”
