Wednesday 31st January 2007
Leigh Nissim, St Minver
St Minver goes for the jackpot
Visitors to the homepages of Virgin or Yahoo! wishing to play a hand of poker or count their lucky numbers with bingo, would be forgiven for thinking these games are run by such high-profile companies.
Leigh Nissim, UK managing director of St Minver, delights in noting it is in-fact the Gibraltar-based business which allows, through its licence and banking facilities, the entry of these brands into the gambling and gaming markets. He says: ‘Yes, it is Virgin bingo and yes, it is Yahoo! bingo or lastminute.com casino, but the reality is that all of these sites and players are pooled on our licence, our banking, our customer service – everything.’ St Minver is a pan-European, multi-currency gaming operator that forms ‘white label’ partnerships with businesses. The partners –lacking the all-important licence and banking facilities – simply have to use their brands and databases to attract gamers to their websites, while St Minver discreetly acts as croupier, banker and enforcer of house rules. Nissim claims that other gaming companies differ to St Minver in that they ‘like to have their cake and eat it’. By this, he means that certain companies have a white label function but also seek to maintain their own websites and brand. In his view, there is an inherent conflict of interest when both the gaming network operator and its partners are seeking users. He argues that it is not unusual for a branded gaming outfit, providing games for a partner, to channel gamers to its own site or sites so as not to pay revenue share over to the partner.
Recipe for success For St Minver, the white-label approach appears to be successful. Set up in 2003 by executive chairman Gary Shaw, the company now has 102 staff (85 based in Gibraltar) with turnover of £25 million for year-end July 2006. It achieved a net profit of £1.7 million for that same period. The timing for St Minver has also been kind as the internet has finally become everything the dot.com companies had prematurely hoped for at the end of the 90s. According to Nissim, the emergence of a genuinely worldwide web can be traced back to a specific time: October 2001. ‘There was a big spike in traffic and everyone started to pick up on the internet,' he says. Before that time, the dot.coms were marketing to a non-existent audience as no-one was actually online. The emergence of a virtual entertainment industry would not have been possible without broadband and service providers constantly offering faster connections. ‘This innovation is fuelling the growth of the internet so every experience online is just getting better,’ says Nissim. Like many people at the moment, he is particularly excited by the whole phenomenon of Web 2.0. He says: ‘Basic gaming is social networking. Every day people play against each other online, they interact, talk and spend money. It’s a social environment.’
Marc Barber
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