Danny Rippon: “Retention is becoming more important as African markets mature.”

Danny Rippon, CEO of Axom Gaming, talks to Casino Guru about how Africa’s iGaming market is evolving beyond a heavy focus on acquisition, why CRM and player lifetime value are becoming increasingly important, and how AI-driven decisioning can help operators scale.

Q: Africa has attracted huge interest from operators and suppliers in recent years. Where do you think the real opportunity now lies beyond simply entering new markets?

Danny Rippon: We’re now beyond that first wave of market entry that focused so heavily on acquisition. It was a period when growing a player base was relatively simple, and operators could establish themselves without needing to focus too much on efficiency.

The next phase is more interesting because it becomes about the quality of growth rather than just growing at any cost. As these markets become more competitive, operators are fighting over the same customers. Of course, that pushes up costs, but it also forces the operators to think far more carefully about what they do with players after they’ve signed up.

There are a lot of questions to answer. How quickly are you gaining a deep understanding of your players? Are you giving them a truly relevant and personal experience? Are you spending your promotional budget where it genuinely changes behaviour, or simply rewarding activity that would have happened anyway? That is where CRM becomes much more strategic.

For operators with ambitions across several African markets, there is a huge opportunity to improve growth by generating more value from individual customer relationships. Axom Gaming is working closely with operators now so that they are able to better understand their own unique player mix within the wider context of the market. It is a considerably more sustainable way of doing business than just assuming you can acquire more players down the line.

Q: One of the challenges with Africa is the sheer diversity between markets. How should that shape an operator’s CRM strategy?

The era of building an "Africa strategy" as though the entire continent acts in the same way is now well and truly over.

As with anywhere else in the world, every market has its own characteristics. You have different levels of market maturity, product preferences, payment behaviour, player values and attitudes towards promotions. Even the role of sportsbook and casino can differ a lot from one country to another. We’re seeing certain markets act in quite unique ways, particularly around product. The popularity of different types of crash games has been really interesting to watch.

The partners we work with are now looking to learn directly from local behaviour. And that should be more granular than simply trying to paint a picture of what, say, Kenyan or Ghanaian players prefer.

There are different levels to think about the experience you deliver, and how that’s personalised. You can look continent-wide at Africa, then drill down into a specific national market, then a specific operator within that market, the product and games they offer, and then right down to the individual player mix.

We’re now at a stage where it is possible to understand individuals at scale, and react to their behaviour in near real time. The opportunity is to combine local understanding with technology that can adapt at the player level. It’s basically a segment of one, but informed by the wider market context.

Q: How different is the CRM challenge in African markets compared with more mature European jurisdictions?

There are some differences in market structure, but the underlying challenge is actually very similar. Operators have a huge amount of customer data but still need to decide what to do with it.

Where Africa becomes really interesting is the pace at which some businesses are scaling. An operator can add markets, brands and large numbers of customers relatively quickly, and suddenly the number of CRM decisions it needs to make increases exponentially.

In a mature market, you may already have years of legacy processes and complex segmentation in place. In some African markets, operators have an opportunity to build a more intelligent approach earlier in their development. That's where we see Axom sitting, as a decisioning layer above the operator’s existing CRM stack.

Q: What does AI actually add to CRM in practical terms, particularly for an operator growing across Africa?

We know how AI can help with automation, but I think many operators are still undervaluing its role as a decision maker. I know many businesses that already have strong CRM platform capabilities, but struggle with the question of which elements to use and when.

That is where AI can process far more information than a human team realistically could.

With 888AFRICA, for example, we saw net gaming revenue uplift progress from around 2% in the first month to 7% in the second and 18% in the third.

What was particularly interesting was that the underlying CRM setup remained the same. The improvement came entirely from better targeting and decision-making for each individual player. Axom integrated seamlessly, quickly and directly into 888Africa's existing CRM workflow. We enhanced and sharpened every customer decision across the platform.

The implications of this are important for African operators, because it means growth does not necessarily require replacing technology or continually adding headcount.

Q: If you look three to five years ahead, what will separate the operators that succeed in Africa from those that struggle to scale?

I think one of the biggest differentiators will be how intelligently operators manage complexity.

Growing across Africa can look very attractive on paper, but every additional market brings new customers, different behaviours, different commercial conditions and more decisions that need to be made. Understanding this from the perspective of the individual player is going to be critical, and that’s where Axom comes in.

If your answer to that complexity is simply more people, more campaigns and more segmentation, eventually the model becomes difficult and expensive to scale. Not only that, there’s also a danger you forget how to treat players as individuals. The real challenge now is building that local market knowledge while keeping the customer experience relevant.

The opportunity in Africa remains massive, the bar is already high and things are only going to become more competitive. The operators that win will be those who understand individual players at scale within their local context, and that's where Axom's decisioning engine comes in.

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