Finding a great deal of success with its online sportsbook, U.K. bookmaker Victor Chandler Group is spreading its wings in the online gaming market.
After more than a year of bringing its strong betting brand to the Internet, the company is adding an online casino to its fold at www.victorchandler.com. The company announced an agreement last week with Sweden-based software supplier Boss Media in which Boss Media will supply it with its entire suite of casino games.
The site currently has a Spin Room with Java-based casino games, but the Boss Media agreement will enable Victor Chandler to offer client-server based casino games.
Victor Chandler's chairman, whose namesake is the company's founder, said the partnership with Boss is inline with the company's global approach to the Internet.
"We chose Boss Media because of the quality of their market-leading product," Chandler said. "Boss Media will help us to achieve our strategy of continued growth and build upon our established online business. We will now be able to offer multilingual and multicurrency versions of the online casino, thus enabling us to move into new markets."
Victor Chandler, based in Gibraltar, has a strong player base in both the United Kingdom and Asia.
The deal also made sense for Boss Media. The company's investor relations representative said that different versions of the online casino will cater to player bases from different parts of the world.
"They will have different version since they're going to market it differently," Ulrika Persson explained. "A portion of the online casino is going to be marketed to the U.K.; some of it's going to be marketed towards Asian markets and those players will want to choose different games."
Persson said that Boss isn't looking to take players from the Spin Room section of the site. "They are adding to their portfolio, so their players can have a bigger choice of what they want to do," she said.
There's no exact target date to launch the new games, but Persson said the first versions should be out sometime in November. The first version will be in English, Boss' specialty, but later versions will include German, Cantonese, Mandarin and Spanish, according to Persson. The full range of languages should be completed within six months of launch.
U.S. dollars will be the only currency accepted in the first version, but there are plans to get others on board. Which ones will depend on which banks work with the system, and the details won't be known until sometime next year, Persson said.
While Victor Chandler is looking to spread its wings among the players in the industry, Persson pointed out that the deal will also help Boss strengthen its position in the online gaming market.
"This is a very known customer, both on the Internet and in the land-based industry," she said. "They have a name already in the U.K. and also in Asia. They have succeeded very well on the Internet, so they will of course contribute to Boss Media's profits. They're a big company, a well-known name."