20 Years of PAM Integrations

Over the past 20 years, PAM Integration has played a pivotal role in mkodo’s success in developing apps for our global clients. Allowing mkodo to seamlessly integrate back-office operations with multiple external systems, giving clients the flexibility to monitor and manage key operational features at their own convenience. This aspect of development has progressed significantly since mkodo first implemented betting and gaming integration over a decade ago in 2007.

The first company mkodo integrated with on this level was the Blue Square sports betting mobile product in 2007. This was a Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) site, integrated into the OpenBet platform. This domain was new and was a beneficial learning curve for the mkodo development team. During the discovery phase there was not the wealth of industry experience that mkodo relies upon today that would have enabled the right questions to be asked, especially around regulatory and compliance features.

14 years later, it is mkodo’s domain expertise and understanding of the regulatory landscape that puts the brand ahead of other front-end providers.

Of the many integration challenges we experienced was the user behaviour of sports book, where peak transactions where significantly higher than the normal running volumes, as an example The Grand National Horse Race.

This requires infrastructure changes to deal with these peaks in a controlled manner, which are still utilised to this day

mkodo’s second ever sports betting integration was with SkyBet in 2009. For this project the development team was able to build on the foundation created with Blue Square, but with a significantly increased focus on infrastructure and scalability.

At these early stages of the development journey with PAM integration, some of the biggest challenges were adapting to new domanial knowledge, keeping up with regulatory changes, and multi-language support, amongst a raft of other small pain points that took hard work to find solutions for over the years.

In development, the majority of time is not spent on the writing of the code but spent working out what should be written. Building up domanial knowledge and the infrastructure needed to support the problems in that specific domanial area, meant being able to focus on the simple tasks of implementing API calls, which has been a huge benefit.

There have been many key learning points over the past two decades but the main aspects that have proven to be most critical in mkodo’s app development journey are as follows:

• Minimising the number of requests a web/app client needs to make through aggregation and abstraction. This combines multiple API calls into a single call and dispenses with unnecessary data between the PAM and the client. To this date, it is found that many PAM APIs are ‘data heavy’ and/or designed for web clients, whereas they should all be architected with a ‘mobile first’ approach. We call this MOA or Mobile Optimized Architecture and is designed to create the most optimum amount of network calls and data to fulfil the user journey

• Compliance and user data has also been a major focus of improvement along the journey. All middleware logs traffic data but there are competing compliance requirements for logging user transactions while anonymising that data for GDPR purposes amongst others. Locality of data is also important: e.g., in Canada all player data must be stored in Canada, which in some cases can limit some infrastructure options.

• App changes and updates in general can be difficult and time consuming, but not at mkodo. Through extensive experience in submitting and updating over 200+ apps, over the last 11 years, mkodo have found that approval processes for Apple and Google mean releases can be delayed, even for simple compliance changes. A key reason why mkodo developed the process of releasing changes to an in-house platform, the ‘MaS abstraction layer’ so that most of the detailed logic is housed internally and minimises any wasted time.

Since mkodo first implemented PAM integrations, over the past 20 years, mkodo have been able to integrate with a number of other market leading platforms including FinSoft, OpenBet, NeoPollard Interactive, Bede, Stride and the most recent, Bejoynd. This has given mkodo the flexibility to be able to work with an extremely wide range of operators across the globe, providing durable and easy to manage digital products for all customers. Now looking forward to the next 20 years!