David Harris, Operations Lead at ReferOn: “Understanding clients is at the core of ReferOn”

Shows & conferences - 30 July, 2025

David Harris, Operations Lead at ReferOn, gave an exclusive interview to Focus Gaming News in which he spoke about affiliates and what affiliate managers and operators are currently looking for.   According to Harris, affiliates want more data to understand how they are performing compared to other brands or programmes. "Basically, they just want more and more, year on year. And, of course, there are more tools out there, more variables, and more ways to track as technology continues to grow," he explained.   In this regard, ReferOn has done important work to understand what operators need in order to feel comfortable with the ReferOn system. Harris added: “We get feedback from both sides to understand what metrics they need, where they need them, and what the overall impact would be.”   The operations lead at ReferOn also referred to data fragmentation, something that continues to create difficulties for some operators when it comes to unifying reports from multiple brands. On this point, Harris explained that what is needed is clean data, not fragmented data. That is why it is essential to have an ever-growing source to collect information, review it, and understand how much is noise and how much is actually true. To address this issue, ReferOn decided to make their reporting very open. "It allows affiliate managers and affiliates to click and choose what they need at any given time, plus it also offers the opportunity to use APIs. We have several cases now of affiliates and operators in our portfolio using these APIs, actually running them in their Tableau or other data warehousing solutions to look at trends, further budgeting, traffic light systems, and understanding the different definitions that come from affiliates running different programmes—not just ReferOn."   In another part of the interview, Harris mentioned user experience and elaborated on the concept of “lazy design” as a way of approaching the interface and user experience as something simple, easy, accessible, and straightforward.   Finally, the Operations Lead at ReferOn shared his vision of the future of affiliate management and explained that at ReferOn they would like to move forward in certain directions, but at the same time, they need to keep the core features strong and stable, as that is the main foundation of any affiliate platform. “So, we take those tickets and chip away at them over time, maybe working on the back end, setting the foundational code, and then, over time, laying out the floors of the house and building up as we go,” he said, adding: "We have some nice features hopefully coming by the end of the year. All of our clients, and future clients, will hopefully be looking forward to these as we move forward."