In a match made in Isle of Man licensing heaven, SunOnline Ltd. and ukbetting plc announced an agreement today that will marry Sun's online Casino Atlantis with ukbetting's sports betting portal.
SunOnline is a subsidiary of Sun International Hotels Ltd., which operates the land-based Atlantis Resort and Casino in the Bahamas as well as hotel-casinos in Dubai, the Indian Ocean and Connecticut. It was granted an online gambling license by the Isle of Man in September.
Eric Semel, CEO of ukbetting, said the agreement is for ukbetting to provide sports betting services to Sun's gaming site, which will be an online version of the Atlantis casino. The site is expected to go live within the next week.
Casino players on the Sun site will be provided with links to the ukbetting site, where they can wager on sports. From the ukbetting site, there will be ample opportunities to get back to the Sun site, Semel said.
"Should their customers care to make a sports bet, then obviously we would facilitate that, and wherever we have sports wagering customers who wish to play an online casino, then we will do our best to direct those customers to Sun's casino," he said.
In addition to the ukbetting wagering site, ukbetting owns betting site totalbet.com as well as sportinglife.com, one of England's largest sports content portals and sportal.com.
Semel said ukbetting had been in talks with Sun about the arrangement since August. Tobin Prior, the chief executive of SunOnline, said the connection with ukbetting will provide Sun casino gamblers with another avenue for betting.
"We believe that the fixed-odds sports betting and related content service that ukbetting can now provide will represent an excellent additional offering to our customers," Prior said. "Having examined a number of options, it was the combination of top-quality fixed-odds sports betting, sports consumer brands and strategic vision aligned with our own objectives that led us to partner with ukbetting."
A SunOnline spokeswoman, Jaime Lister, said the hotel and casino company chose ukbetting as a sports wagering partner in part because of its reputation.
"ukbetting are a very good brand in this country and they're very, very trustworthy," she said. Those are sort of the key important things that SunOnline always has to consider--the trustworthiness of the site, do they match our brand. Because the Sun International brand is huge, is very reliable."
Semel said the sites would be kept separate operationally, so users will actually leave the Sun site to wager on ukbetting and vice versa.
"I think there are several operational and possible regulatory issues, certainly we're running on different back ends," he said. "We're running on the Orbis platform, they're running on Boss Media, and it just seemed that although we could make it a white label, or seamless to the user, for regulatory reasons and operational reasons it made sense to have both operations completely separate."