Giannis Papakonstantinou, Altenar: “Product is what brings people into the website, and it is also what engages them and keeps them there”
Shows & conferences - 14 October, 2026
Personalisation, not market depth, will separate sportsbooks from one another, Giannis Papakonstantinou, Director of Sportsbook Product at Altenar, told Focus Gaming News at SBC Summit Lisbon 2026, as he set out what operators now expect from a provider.
Papakonstantinou said product and the news from Brazil were the main topics at Altenar’s stand. Asked what operators look for today, he put trading first: it is “not glamorous at all”, but strong trading “makes the difference in terms of profitability”, which in turn funds acquisition, marketing and growth. Product, he added, has two roles: bringing players to the site and keeping them there. For the first, he pointed to promotional markets such as super early payout, also known as “one up”, which “can be very expensive” but is “a great marketing and acquisition tool”. For the second, he cited personalisation and gamification, with localisation as a long-term differentiator for a global B2B supplier.
On gamification, Altenar lets any third-party CRM tag players inside the sportsbook engine so operators can run targeted promotions, such as boosted odds or golden boosts. Bet builder, or same game parlay, is a heavy focus of the product, with more markets and improved in-house models, and many promotions are built around it.
Altenar uses around 25 data feeds and, he said, selects the best in terms of quality and latency, so operators receive a fully managed service rather than negotiating with feed suppliers. Papakonstantinou admitted that maintaining the integrations is “a pain”, but argued that it is part of what makes the product special. The company also does the trading on behalf of operators, with custom margin control and trading strategies set at jurisdiction, brand or operator level. It recently added automated segmentation, which uses machine learning to identify player categories faster.
Looking ahead to 2027, personalisation will be a major development focus. Altenar has already released fully automated, player-level personalised recommendations based on betting history and patterns. A few years ago, he noted, the successful sportsbook was the one with the most markets; today “all successful sportsbooks offer pretty much the same” depth, so “the difference is how you can promote the markets that make sense on an individual level”. The experience, he explained, is similar to Netflix: content “recommended for you”.