Corporate & Product Overview
Corporate Overview
Home to the world's biggest online betting community, Betfair is striving to become the pre-eminent betting platform for the internet. After launching the world's first successful online betting exchange in June 2000, Betfair has grown into a multi-billion dollar business with an established portfolio of online gaming products comprising of poker, casino and games. The company now has in excess of two million registered customers with over 50% of all new registrations coming from outside the UK and Ireland.
Betfair is major investor in new technology and employs over 400 engineers to produce one of the fastest and most resilient betting platforms available on the internet. Across all its products, Betfair processes more than 6 million transactions on an average day - more than all the European stock exchanges combined - and settlement is immediate. 99.9 per cent of transactions are completed in less than one second.
Betfair holds licences in the UK, Australia, Austria, Germany, Italy and Malta and will only operate and market in countries in which it believes that it is legally able to do so. The company welcomes regulation and is actively seeking new licences around the world. It is committed to paying the appropriate product fees in every market in which it operates.
Betfair employs over 1,500 people globally. Its headquarters are in Hammersmith in West London, while its international business is hosted in Malta. It also has large operational bases in Stevenage and Australia with a software development business in Romania.
It is a two-time winner of the Queen's Award for Enterprise - the only betting company in the world ever to achieve this level of recognition.
Our strategy is simple - we want to be the unassailable first choice of the punter by providing the best value, service and protection. We intend to achieve this through continued investment in our technology and a continued commitment to setting the benchmark standard in innovation, integrity, fairness and consumer protection.
Product Overview
- Betfair's Betting Exchange - www.betfair.com - revolutionised the betting industry when it was launched in the summer of 2000. Based on the New York Stock Exchange model, the exchange allows punters to bet at odds set by other punters rather than the bookmaker itself. Betfair's bookmaking model results in odds which, according to one study, are on average more than 20 per cent better than those offered by conventional bookmakers. Bets are only accepted by the exchange if the full risk of each can be matched with a punter or set of punters with the opposite view. Betfair generates revenue by charging a small commission (between 2%-5% for over 99% of users) on the customer's net winnings. It operates out of Hammersmith in West London and Hobart in Tasmania. Betfair is developing new revenue streams, such as providing price feeds to third parties, creating white-label exchanges and broadening its mobile phone product, www.betfairmobile.com.
- Betfair Games, Betfair Poker and Betfair Casino are incorporated and registered in Malta. Betfair Poker - www.betfairpoker.com - was launched in 2005 and operates on its own platform. It is the exclusive online sponsor of the World Series of Poker Europe event. The Betfair Casino - www.betfaircasino.com - offers the world's only 'Zero Lounge', an online casino without a house edge, as well as more traditional casino games and the Betfair Arcade. The Maltese licenses enable Betfair to offer these products as well as the innovative P2P games - www.betfairgames.com - based on the betting exchange concept, to its customers.
- Tradefair - www.tradefair.com - launched in the autumn of 2007 which became the first application of Betfair's exchange technology outside the betting industry. Focusing on financial markets, Tradefair uses the exchange for products like binaries and Hi-Lo, while relying on a white-label partnership for its spread betting product. Tradefair moves the Betfair Group into the online retail financial derivatives market and is expected to achieve FSA authorisation shortly.