Michał Głowacki, Chief Operating Officer of SB Software, brings more than a decade of experience across Georgia, Poland, Africa and Eastern Europe to his role at the iGaming technology provider. SB Software develops a modular platform for sportsbook and casino operators, supporting both online and retail operations with solutions including PAM, payment integrations and market-specific functionality.
In this CasinoRank Interview, Głowacki examines the operational challenges of connecting retail and online betting, from unified player data and wallets to loyalty and real-time intelligence. He also discusses PAM architecture, infrastructure, customization and the balance between centralized data and modular technology as operators look to scale across increasingly diverse markets.
Given SB Software’s strong presence across online and retail betting in African markets, what operational differences do operators often underestimate when trying to unify player data and wallet functionality across both channels?
Michał Głowacki: The core challenge is data continuity, and it’s more common than people admit. African players are mobile-first by default – the phone is the internet for most of them. But retail and online systems were typically built independently and don’t talk to each other. A player can be a high-value regular at a shop and a complete unknown on the same operator’s app – same person, two separate records, zero connection.
What operators underestimate is that you can’t solve this with a CRM patch or a loyalty bolt-on. You need a platform that was designed from the start to treat retail and online as two channels of the same player journey – shared wallet, shared identity, shared history. Without that foundation, unification is just a PowerPoint slide. With it, everything else – loyalty, personalisation, cross-sell becomes possible almost naturally.
What differentiates a PAM built to support growth and product differentiation from one focused primarily on getting operators to market quickly, and where do operators leave value on the table by choosing one over the other?
Michał Głowacki: In practice there are two very different types of PAMs on the market. The first is a white-label-ready solution, configured and ready to go live quickly, which is exactly what operators need when speed to market matters more than differentiation.
The second is a fully customisable private-label platform for operators who want to compete on product, not just marketing. Custom features, market-specific logic, mechanics that don’t exist off the shelf. That’s where a PAM becomes a genuine competitive advantage rather than just infrastructure.
What we’ve built at SB Software is a platform that can act as both – and operators can grow from one into the other without switching platforms.
Infrastructure performance became a key topic through SB Software’s work supporting Editec’s expansion across more than 20 markets. What did that project reveal about platform architecture, hosting infrastructure, and player experience?
Michał Głowacki: Editec is primarily a retail operation, which means the traffic pattern is nothing like a typical online operator. The biggest peaks happen Saturday mornings – everyone placing their bets before the first Premier League kick-off. You have to properly size infrastructure for those spikes, because overprovisioning costs money and underprovisioning kills the experience at exactly the moment it matters most.
The other lesson is support. When you’re operating at that scale across that many markets, something will go wrong eventually, and when it does, you need someone picking up the phone immediately. 24/7 support isn’t a nice-to-have in retail, it’s the foundation the whole operation sits on.
SB Software recently introduced SB Intelligence™. Which operational or player-focused decisions are benefiting most from real-time intelligence today, and where are operators still failing to act effectively on the data available?
Michał Głowacki: The decisions benefiting most are the ones with the shortest windows – bonus triggering, in-play pricing, churn prevention. These have a window of minutes or seconds. If your intelligence is batch-processed, you’ve already missed it.
Where operators are consistently failing is what I’d call data-to-decision latency. The data is there, the dashboards are there, but there are too many manual steps between insight and action. Someone has to see the report, design a campaign, get sign-off, push it live. By then the player has already left. The operators winning right now have automated that last mile – the intelligence fires an action directly, with pre-defined guardrails, not a notification to a CRM manager.
What are the biggest disconnects you currently see between what operators believe players want and what player data is actually showing?
Michał Głowacki: The biggest one is bonuses. Some operators believe players want bigger bonuses. The data shows players want faster withdrawals. Research from last year showed that 8 out of 10 players said withdrawal speed directly influenced where they placed their bets. Those operators are still competing on promotional spend when they should be competing on trust.
The second is game portfolios. Some operators keep expanding them – more titles, more providers, more choice. But players don’t want more choice, they want the right games surfaced at the right moment. Quick-session formats like crash games are consistently outperforming large game portfolios in repeat session activity, particularly on mobile.
And then UX and UI – but not in the way most operators think about it. Players don’t need beautiful interfaces, they need fast ones. Quick deposit when your balance is low, instant access to bet history, stats and data exactly where you need them to make a decision. Every extra tap is friction, and friction loses bets.
How does SB Software balance customization requests with platform stability, especially when clients are integrating third-party casino content, payment providers, and localized tools across multiple jurisdictions?
Michał Głowacki: The key distinction we make is between configuration and customization. Almost everything a client needs, jurisdiction-specific rules, localized payment methods, bonus mechanics, can be achieved through configuration if the platform was built with that in mind. That’s where we start.
When genuine customization is needed, we ask one question: is this something other clients will want in the next 12 months? If yes, it goes into the product roadmap. If it’s specific to one client’s market or regulatory context, we build it in isolation so it doesn’t affect the core platform for everyone else.
As sportsbook, casino, payments, CRM, and loyalty systems become increasingly interconnected, do you see operators moving toward unified ecosystems or modular architectures that allow best-in-class components to be replaced as business needs evolve?
Michał Głowacki: Both, and the distinction matters less than people think.
The industry narrative right now is heavily pro-modular. Operators want the flexibility to plug in best-in-class components and replace them as the market evolves. That’s real. But modular without a unified data layer just creates a different kind of problem. You can have best-in-class sportsbook, casino, CRM and payments all talking through APIs and still not have a single player view, because each system holds its own version of the player record.
The operators winning right now have unified data architecture with modular execution. The PAM sits at the center as the single source of truth – wallet, identity, compliance. Around it you can swap components freely. That’s very different from a fully locked stack, but also very different from a fully decoupled one where nobody owns the player relationship.
What operators actually want is one partner who holds the architecture together and takes responsibility for how the pieces fit, while still giving them freedom to bring their own providers in specific areas. That’s the model we’re built around.
With a background in digital media and a keen eye for emerging technologies, Ronaldo bridges the gap between players and platforms through clear, insightful reporting to the iGaming industry.
