Kingmakers Group is one of Africa’s fastest-growing gaming and sports betting businesses, operating across Nigeria, South Africa and Malta. Having grown from a standing start to over 300 employees, Kingmakers’ data operations were very immature, with poor-quality, unreliable data holding back the group’s plans for growth.

Ian Thomas joined Kingmakers as interim Chief Data Officer with the following goals:

• Define a data strategy for the company and build an end-to-end data function that could execute on the strategy

• Support the group’s ambitions to secure significant inward investment to help grow the business

Delivery

During the project, Ian led multiple initiatives to improve Kingmakers’ data maturity across the board:

• Creating a compelling and aspirational data strategy that laid out the vision for how data could support Kingmakers’ growth

• Designing and hiring a multidisciplinary team to accelerate progress in data engineering, analytics, data science and governance

• Architecting a scalable enterprise data platform to support diverse batch and real-time workloads for analytic, data science and product use cases

• Implementing a CRM platform to enable targeted customer communications and improve customer insights, enabling 120% year-on-year active user growth

• Supporting the executive leadership in discussions with a major investor, Multichoice Group, providing data and insights to substantiate claims about business growth and health, resulting in $380m investment in the business

Results

• Grew data and analytics team by 500% in 12 months

• Successfully assisted the business in securing $380m investment from Multichoice Group, Africa’s leading media company

• Enabled 120% year-on-year active user growth through support for targeted marketing and CRM activities with data