Australia
Westpac Expands Digital Gambling Block Feature for More Customers
Westpac Group has extended its digital gambling block feature to provide more ways for customers to restrict their spend with gambling merchants in real-time. The latest changes mean the digital feature will now be available for over two million St.George, BankSA and Bank of Melbourne personal debit card customers.
The digital feature was made available earlier this year enabling customers with eligible cards to apply an instant block on certain gambling-related transactions through their mobile or online banking. When the gambling block is applied, transactions to certain gambling merchants including casinos, sports betting agencies and online gambling companies are instantly prevented.
Catherine Fitzpatrick, Director of Customer Vulnerability & Financial Resilience at Westpac, said: “Problem gambling continues to be a serious issue in Australian communities, and as more people transact online during the pandemic, the digital feature gives customers the ability to manage their gambling spend whenever they might need it.
“The benefits of being able to apply a block in real-time also it gives customers more control and flexibility in the moment.
“While the majority of customers are now using digital channels to complete their everyday banking tasks, our Customer Care team continues to remain available as another way for customers to call and have a block applied.”
As part of the latest updates, a gambling block is also now automatically applied to all Westpac Group debit cardholders under the age of 18 to help prevent underage gambling.
Lauren Levin, Director of Policy & Campaigns at Financial Counselling Australia said more people have become concerned about their finances and gambling during the pandemic.
“We are noticing the pandemic has led to a rise in people gambling more and worried about their money.
“The gambling block is a great idea. Research tells us that the more often a person gambles, the greater the risk of developing a gambling issue. The bank gambling block is an easy tool that will help a lot of people.
“We’d also see the feature being used by other household or family members as a preventative measure.
“We encourage anyone who is worried about their gambling to use features like Westpac’s gambling block, but also seek help. There are many doorways. You won’t be judged. Talk to a family member or friend, a professional, or speak to your bank for support,” Levin said.
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Anthony Woods
PointsBet Goes All In on Grafana Cloud to Power AI-Driven Observability at Scale
Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, announced that PointsBet, one of Australia’s fastest-growing digital wagering operators, has selected Grafana Cloud as its unified observability platform. PointsBet is using Grafana Cloud to consolidate telemetry across its proprietary betting platform, accelerate incident resolution with AI-powered insights and give engineering teams the visibility they need to own and operate their services with confidence.
“Our platform is our product. Grafana Cloud gives us one place to see everything — and the AI tools to act on it fast,” Daniel Lucas, CTO at PointsBet.
Grafana Cloud was selected for its ability to deliver:
• Unified Observability Across Every Data Source: PointsBet’s proprietary platform spans real-time odds calculation, player account management, front-end apps and a custom-built betting engine, all generating high-volume telemetry from multiple sources. With Grafana Cloud, PointsBet can ingest and correlate metrics, logs, traces and profiles in a single open platform, ending the fragmentation that slows incident response. Built on OpenTelemetry and open source foundations including Grafana Loki, Grafana Tempo and Prometheus, there’s no vendor lock-in — just a unified view of the stack. This flexibility is what enables PointsBet’s shift towards a true service ownership model: engineering teams can now observe, understand and act on what they build.
• AI That’s Actually Useful: Grafana Assistant gives PointsBet engineers a context-aware AI co-pilot for investigation and troubleshooting, letting them query telemetry in natural language, navigate dashboards and trace issues to root cause without deep expertise in PromQL, LogQL or TraceQL. Now generally available in Grafana Cloud, Grafana Assistant can run multi-step incident investigations, generate and refine queries on the fly, and surface the right data at the right moment — keeping every action inside the tools teams already use. For a business where live betting windows close in seconds, reducing time-to-resolution isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s a competitive edge.
• Application Observability That Empowers Developers: Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides PointsBet’s teams with end-to-end visibility into how their services perform — surfacing service dependency maps, latency hotspots and the customer impact of every change. By connecting distributed traces, metrics and logs in a unified view, Application Observability helps teams understand not just that something broke, but why and who is affected.
“Observability used to mean drowning in dashboards, alert noise and waiting for someone else to tell you what’s on fire. We chose Grafana Cloud because it brings technology and commercial teams together on the single view building autonomous value streams — and Grafana Assistant means our engineers spend less time asking ‘what’s wrong’ and more time fixing it. It enables the shift from reactive firefighting to teams that genuinely own their services end to end and that helps us build a platform our customers can reliably bet on,” said Saurabh Vyas, Head of SRE, PointsBet.
“Real-time platforms at scale are some of the hardest systems to operate — every component has to perform under pressure, and every signal matters when something goes wrong. PointsBet’s engineering team has built a sophisticated platform, and we’re proud to give their engineers the observability foundation they need to operate it. Open, AI-powered, and built to cut through complexity — that’s exactly what Grafana Cloud is for,” said Anthony Woods, co-founder of Grafana Labs.
The post PointsBet Goes All In on Grafana Cloud to Power AI-Driven Observability at Scale appeared first on EE Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.
Australia
Elections, Bitcoin, and the Australian Open: Slotegrator breaks down prediction markets in new ebook
Annual trading volume in the prediction market vertical grew from $500 million to $64 billion in only three years. What’s behind their explosive popularity? In a new ebook, Slotegrator lays out why this latest evolution in betting has so much appeal for players and what operators need to consider before launching their own prediction market.
Why have prediction markets captured so much attention? In a new downloadable ebook, Slotegrator lays out the factors behind the vertical’s popularity, analyzes how prediction markets are disrupting the modern betting landscape, and provides a checklist to help readers decide if
the time is right for them to add a prediction market to their platform.
In the ebook, Slotegrator highlights generational shifts in preferences and behavior, such as the increase in younger players who are familiar with trading and financial markets, as one of the main drivers in the rise of the format. There’s also a widespread change in values; players view the P2P exchange mechanic, in particular, as a more transparent form of betting than wagering against the house.
“Today, the audience’s attention shifts in real time across platforms, and digital experiences evolve constantly. If you’re not actively tracking where engagement is moving, you’re not just behind the trend — you’re already losing relevance in the market,” comments Olga Ivanchik, COO of Slotegrator.
Opinion-based betting allows users to trade literally any event from politics to current events. The pursuit of getting a more interactive, dynamic, and fair experience is reflected in prediction market mechanics: the odds in this type of betting are not set by the house but fluctuate in accordance with supply and demand — players bet against each other, and the platform generates revenue on commissions based on the amount of bets.
“This transition eliminates the old conflict of interest and gives us a more transparent, equitable, and stimulating experience where value is defined by the market itself”, says Maksym Shtun, Product Owner at Slotegrator.
The report provides analytics with key figures, regulatory notes, expert comments, and an explanation of the mechanics involve. It also includes useful tips for readers:
- A checklist that will help operators understand whether they need prediction markets on
their platform - Tips and recommendations on the events for betting by region
- Comparison of prediction market mechanics with classic sportsbooks
- Analysis of relevant psychological factors
- Breakdown of how exactly how prediction markets generate revenue
Download the guide and get a full understanding of the prediction market phenomenon. Be among the first operators to make the most of the quickest growing opportunity in iGaming.
ABOUT THE COMPANY
Since 2012, Slotegrator has been one of the iGaming industry’s leading software and business solution providers for online casino and sportsbook operators.
The company’s main focus is software development and support for online casino platforms, as well as the integration of game content and payment systems.
The company works with licensed game developers and offers a vast portfolio of casino content: slots, live casino games, poker, virtual sports, table games, lotteries, casual games, and data feeds for betting.
Slotegrator also provides consulting services in gambling license acquisition and business incorporation.
The post Elections, Bitcoin, and the Australian Open: Slotegrator breaks down prediction markets in new ebook appeared first on EE Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.
Australia
Elections, Bitcoin, and the Australian Open: Slotegrator breaks down prediction markets in new ebook
Annual trading volume in the prediction market vertical grew from $500 million to $64 billion in only three years. What’s behind their explosive popularity? In a new ebook, Slotegrator lays out why this latest evolution in betting has so much appeal for players and what operators need to consider before launching their own prediction market.
Why have prediction markets captured so much attention? In a new downloadable ebook, Slotegrator lays out the factors behind the vertical’s popularity, analyzes how prediction markets are disrupting the modern betting landscape, and provides a checklist to help readers decide if
the time is right for them to add a prediction market to their platform.
In the ebook, Slotegrator highlights generational shifts in preferences and behavior, such as the increase in younger players who are familiar with trading and financial markets, as one of the main drivers in the rise of the format. There’s also a widespread change in values; players view the P2P exchange mechanic, in particular, as a more transparent form of betting than wagering against the house.
“Today, the audience’s attention shifts in real time across platforms, and digital experiences evolve constantly. If you’re not actively tracking where engagement is moving, you’re not just behind the trend — you’re already losing relevance in the market,” comments Olga Ivanchik, COO of Slotegrator.
Opinion-based betting allows users to trade literally any event from politics to current events. The pursuit of getting a more interactive, dynamic, and fair experience is reflected in prediction market mechanics: the odds in this type of betting are not set by the house but fluctuate in accordance with supply and demand — players bet against each other, and the platform generates revenue on commissions based on the amount of bets.
“This transition eliminates the old conflict of interest and gives us a more transparent, equitable, and stimulating experience where value is defined by the market itself”, says Maksym Shtun, Product Owner at Slotegrator.
The report provides analytics with key figures, regulatory notes, expert comments, and an explanation of the mechanics involve. It also includes useful tips for readers:
- A checklist that will help operators understand whether they need prediction markets on
their platform - Tips and recommendations on the events for betting by region
- Comparison of prediction market mechanics with classic sportsbooks
- Analysis of relevant psychological factors
- Breakdown of how exactly how prediction markets generate revenue
Download the guide and get a full understanding of the prediction market phenomenon. Be among the first operators to make the most of the quickest growing opportunity in iGaming.
ABOUT THE COMPANY
Since 2012, Slotegrator has been one of the iGaming industry’s leading software and business solution providers for online casino and sportsbook operators.
The company’s main focus is software development and support for online casino platforms, as well as the integration of game content and payment systems.
The company works with licensed game developers and offers a vast portfolio of casino content: slots, live casino games, poker, virtual sports, table games, lotteries, casual games, and data feeds for betting.
Slotegrator also provides consulting services in gambling license acquisition and business incorporation.
The post Elections, Bitcoin, and the Australian Open: Slotegrator breaks down prediction markets in new ebook appeared first on Americas iGaming & Sports Betting News.
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