With the UK’s jump season now in full swing after officially kicking off last month, Matt Parr, Global Head of Trading at Amelco, returns to SBC News in a follow-up to October’s preview of an exciting few months ahead.

In addition to touching upon the difficulties of ensuring performance, accuracy and responsiveness remains at its peak, he also elaborates on numerous ways of widening global interest in the product.

SBC News: The jumps season, culminating with Cheltenham and the Grand National, drives massive betting volume. How does Amelco’s upgraded horse racing product ensure peak performance and stability during these high-demand periods?

Matt Parr: Our jumps season peaks – Cheltenham, Aintree, and the Grand National – naturally see huge, betting volumes that can test the limits of any platform. Our upgraded horse racing product is absolutely built to handle that load, ensuring both speed and stability even under the most extreme demand. 

We deliver on that promise via scalable, modular architecture, complemented by rigorous real-time monitoring and redundancy across all key systems. This is how we ensure that punters experience uninterrupted service and that our markets remain responsive no matter how big the spikes get during the biggest moments of the season. 

In short, the platform is engineered to perform under the highest pressure, which is vital for keeping racing fans fully engaged throughout every hurdle of a race and ensuring our operators never miss a crucial revenue opportunity.

SBCN: You’ve championed bridging the gap between racing’s tradition and modern technology. What new features or data-driven tools is Amelco prioritising this season to enhance engagement for punters?

MP: Our team is laser-focused on giving punters actionable insights without compromising the excitement, emotion, and tradition of jump racing. The key is in contextualising the wealth of data that racing generates. 

A big part of our development this season will be focused on enhancing our real-time analytics, which will be displayed directly to the punter. This involves presenting clearer, more digestible information on horse form, sectional timing analysis, and detailed jockey performance metrics. 

To add to that, we’re also evolving our predictive pricing models to maximise operator revenue. These models dynamically reflect the shifting market and live race conditions faster than the competition, giving punters immediate visibility and confidence in the odds they are taking. For us, this is the future: moving beyond simple odds displays, and providing a richer, data-informed betting experience.

SBCN: In a sport with such high volatility (like the Champion Hurdle drama last season), how do Amelco’s data analytics and trading expertise ensure operators can achieve a commercially successful GGR margin while offering competitive odds?

MP: This is where Amelco’s proprietary technology truly excels. We ensure our operators can deliver genuinely competitive odds to attract and retain punters while simultaneously maintaining a strong, double-digit GGR margin. 

It’s a delicate balance, and our expertise lies in achieving commercial sustainability, even in the most unpredictable, high-volatility scenarios the jumps season throws up. Our advanced data analytics allow us to set accurate market-opening prices and, more importantly, manage the risk exposure in real-time as money pours into a race. 

By understanding player behaviour and race outcome probabilities better than others, we can absorb large liabilities while maintaining profitability, which gives our partners a significant competitive advantage.

SBCN: Given Amelco’s involvement in fixed-odds projects and the growing interest in the US, how does the UK/Ireland jumps product act as a benchmark for your international expansion strategy?

MP: The UK and Irish Jumps markets, due to their complexity, history, and immense betting volumes, are the definitive benchmark for our fixed-odds product. 

By proving that we can deliver consistent fixed-odds growth and strong GGR margins in these highly mature and demanding markets, we establish a reliable and robust template that guides all our product launches abroad, including in emerging territories like the US. Crucially, it also enables powerful cross-selling opportunities. 

The familiarity punters around the world have with UK/Irish racing – the prestige of Cheltenham, the spectacle of the Grand National – allows us to introduce them to new territories and products seamlessly, leveraging that established trust and excitement.

SBCN: With the rise of the Gen Z player, how can the drama and excitement of jump racing be packaged and delivered via a betting platform to capture a younger audience who might be new to the complexities of the sport?

MP: We must acknowledge that the Gen Z player is a digital native who expects high-quality, instantly digestible content and a social, gamified experience. To attract them, we have to present the sport’s innate drama and excitement without overwhelming them with tradition. 

This means focusing on packaging the core elements: highlighting the trainer and jockey rivalries, creating engaging content around key moments, and introducing subtle, gamified features within the betting experience itself. 

We need to make the sport accessible, highly engaging, and social, ensuring the excitement of a last-fence thriller or a champion’s return is felt immediately through a superior UI/UX, which is precisely what Amelco is engineered to deliver.

SBCN: Beyond the Cheltenham Festival, what is the single most important metric for Amelco’s horse racing division to achieve during the next six months of the Jumps season?

MP: Beyond the initial success of the Festival, the most important metric for Amelco is sustainable GGR growth achieved while maintaining strong liquidity and punter engagement across all major jump races, not just the peaks. It’s not simply about raw turnover during the biggest weeks. 

It’s about the underlying consistency we deliver through balancing highly competitive pricing, intelligent risk management, and the use of data-driven trading to ensure that both our operators and their customers benefit consistently throughout the full six months of the season. That consistency proves the long-term viability and quality of our platform.