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White Label Business Works For St Minver
96 clients now aboard the Gibraltar express
The Gibraltar based white label provider St Minver received some
solid business publicity this week in an article that appeared in
the UK newspaper The Independent under the title "Producing
'white-label' games for major websites is proving highly profitable
for St Minver."
The article paints a rosy picture of the pan-European, multi-currency
business that operates online gaming and gambling for 96 partners
including household names such as Yahoo! Games, Telefonica, lastminute.com
and Virgin Games. Managing director Leigh Nissim is quoted at length
as he describes the full third party service that his company provides
to skins with games that carry the brand identity of the client.
"The customer actually deposits their cash and plays the games
with St Minver, but it's all via the host brand," says Nissim.
"We also look after issues like fraud, security, customer service,
financial risk, marketing, payouts and chat management."
It is this potential for an effortless partnership on behalf of
the host brand that Nissim believes has enabled St Minver to grow
rapidly as a business since its origins in 2003, and he reveals
that the company now has 110 employees and made GBP1.7 million in
profits last year.
Another major factor contributing to the firm's success is that
St Minver pools players for the various brands it works with from
right across Europe, says Nissim. "Pooling - more commonly
known as liquidity in gaming - is a very important concept because
the higher the volume of players that you have, the more players
you attract."
St Minver was formed in September 2003. "Our chairman Gary
Shaw had a technology background and could see the potential of
internet casinos," explains Nissim. "So he joined Victor
Chandler to deliver white-label deals that weren't a million miles
away from what we now deliver. But with Victor Chandler, it was
never the core of their business, so Gary decided to set something
up on his own and he bought out that business with another investor
who has an interest in high technology companies."
At the same time, St Minver entered into an exclusive agreement
with Boss Media, a listed and well established Swedish gaming software
developer, to operate the poker network.
"As a company, we have a policy not to develop games ourselves
because we believe the skill-set for operating games and writing
them are very different," says Nissim, who adds that as such
they use different software developers for each aspect of their
gaming portfolio.
The biggest challenge was getting the gaming licence. "These
aren't easy things to get, but we managed to get one of only 14
licences in Gibraltar. This was essential to getting decent banking
which in turn is essential to getting customers." By January
2004, St Minver was running online gaming and gambling for the likes
of lastminute.com, while also growing Gala casinos, Gala bingo and
poker.
It hasn't all been plain sailing. Bearing in mind that a lot of
the technology in place at that stage in St Minver's development
was poor and new, it was a stressful year, Nissim admits. "Sometimes,
it all fell down and hundreds of people would be left screaming
because they were in the middle of a game. But you iron these things
out by virtue of experience."
By 2005, St Minver was building up its portfolio of branded customers
and it also proceeded to build a pan-European bingo network. "It
was that year when we started to spread our wings into Europe and
by the following year, we'd got into areas such as Sweden and Russia,"
says Nissim.
St Minver's future goal is to widen its games portfolio further
by introducing black jack tournaments and of course, to get more
big brands on board. "We are also looking to stretch our geographical
reach to areas such as Latin America," says Nissim.
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