Max Meltzer
Strive Gaming was formed in 2021 by former Kambi executives Max Meltzer and Damian Xuereb. The company features a platform for sports betting and iGaming, as well as other products. Strive has staff in Canada, the U.K. and Malta and focuses purely on serving the North American market. Meltzer has a master’s degree in law with a focus on U.S. and U.K. comparative law and IP law from Durham University. He sat down with GGB Publisher Roger Gros at G2E in Las Vegas in October. To hear and view a GGB Podcast of this interview, visit GGBMagazine.com.
GGB: You have a great deal of experience in in the iGaming sector. Tell us what’s happened with Strive over the last three years.
Meltzer: It’s been a wonderful ride since my co-founder Damian and I left Kambi just over three years ago and set up Strive Gaming. It’s been quite a great journey. We’ve got customers such as Golden Nugget, now owned by DraftKings, PointsBet and BetSafe in Ontario. We’ve also got Desert Diamond in Arizona, Four Winds, the tribal casino leaders In Michigan and various others. So it’s been very exciting as we continue to grow.
What do you do for your clients?
Fundamentally, we’re a player account management system—end to end. We also provide app development services and managed services in the form of customer payment risk and fraud agents. We fundamentally think that our PAM (player account management) technology, our modularized approach and our bonus rules engine, which is called the Infinity Engine, give us one of the leading platforms in the U.S. and Canada.
How is your platform different than others?
First of all, we are and were completely designed from the beginning to serve the North American customer base. There are a lot of older technologies out there that are kind of off the shelf from other jurisdictions. I don’t think it’s too disruptive to say that there are PAMs that were basically social casino-based. They are almost 20 years old, these tech stacks. What we’ve designed are very adaptable to the regulatory complexities of going live in modern, multi-state requirements of each and every state that allows regulated sports betting and/or iGaming since PASPA was repealed. During that time, particularly our first year, there were so many different regulations occurring while people were trying to quickly get to market. And that’s very difficult to do with some of those old monolithic systems.
Obviously, operators want their system to capture as much information from the player as possible. How do you do that?
In essence, we have a very great-looking back end that’s a bit like the iTunes of the world. You have all of your customer information inside of it, but also the ease of the ability to integrate it with new content providers, geolocation providers, payment providers and others. And obviously, particularly for our customers that have casino licenses in the iGaming states, being able to quickly integrate and onboard casino customers with new content is really, really important. That’s not readily available with many other PAMs.
And then training is a big part of our onboarding process. We have a training regime where we demonstrate how it works and then we kind of a train the trainer. One of the biggest value adds that Strive offers is that we actually try to offer any operational assistance, not just our managed services group. It adds value to provide more in the form of consultative and operational support alongside our managed services offering to operators, particularly tribal casinos.
Do you have modules for responsible gaming as well?
I think one of the greatest tool sets that we have is the Infinity Rules Engine. When you set it up appropriately from an operator perspective, you can actually identify player behaviors very quickly so you can try to rectify or address any issues that come up. We’re very proud of the fact that we are able to utilize that for responsible gaming as well.
