INTERVIEW JUNE 2026
Interview with Motti Colman: A Decade Building the CRM Infrastructure iGaming Runs On
Optimove has been working with Ai in iGaming since 2012 - Motti Colman has spent ten of those years inside the company, watching the market mature and the implementation reality stay hard.
Interview
Our editor had a conversation with Motti Colman, VP of Revenue, Gaming at Optimove, about how online gambling became the platform's defining vertical, what the Smartico acquisition changes for the market, and what operators need to understand before the five-minute campaign becomes possible. Optimove started building AI into its CRM marketing platform in 2012 - not in response to an industry trend, but because predictive modeling of customer behaviour was the founding premise of the company. Motti Colman joined three years later, in January 2015, and has spent the decade since at the centre of a market that has changed almost beyond recognition.The iGaming vertical he has helped build now accounts for more than half the operators in the EGR Power 50. The question he is still asked most often is not what the platform does. It is what it takes to make it work.
Motti Colman, VP of Revenue, Gaming, Optimove. Image courtesy Optimove
Box-out: Motti Colman, VP of Revenue, Gaming at Optimove
Current Title: VP of Revenue, Gaming
Company: Optimove
Background: Motti Colman has spent close to a decade at Optimove, joining in January 2015 and rising to VP of Revenue, Gaming. He has over 15 years of experience in sales and business development across online and offline gaming, and previously headed a high-net-worth family office in London and held roles at William Hill and BDO, where he qualified as an ACA in forensic accounting. Named to the Gaming Intelligence Hot 50 in both 2024 and 2026, he has been central to building Optimove's iGaming vertical from its Tel Aviv origins into a position serving more than half of the EGR Power 50 operators.
Tel Aviv, 2012: How iGaming Found Optimove
Optimove was not designed for iGaming. Founded in 2012 by Pini Yakuel, it was built as a general-purpose CRM Marketing Platform for any sector where behavioural data was rich enough to support predictive modelling. The founding logic was straightforward: if you could anticipate where a customer was heading in their lifecycle, you could act before they left rather than reacting after they had gone.
What made iGaming the vertical where that proposition proved most powerful was data density. Online gambling operators hold between 100 and 200 data points per player — bet history, session duration, game preferences, deposit patterns, device behaviour, response to previous campaigns. That is an unusually rich environment, and it is precisely what a platform built on predictive modelling needs. "Online gambling has a high number of data points for their customers," Colman says. "It is a data-rich environment."
The connection deepened for geographic reasons. In 2012, Tel Aviv was a centre of gravity for online gambling technology. When operators including William Hill, Playtech, and Ladbrokes were building their digital operations, several drew on Israeli technology to do it. Optimove was already there, already thinking about customer data in ways the industry had not yet articulated for itself. "AI is nothing new for us," Colman says. "What took longer was finding the right terms for our customers to understand what we could do." That translation effort — from data science into marketing language — occupied the company for years, and it is part of what separates a platform with a decade of iGaming experience from one that has recently arrived in the vertical.
Today Optimove serves large iGaming operators alongside clients in e-commerce, online trading, and banking, but iGaming remains the vertical that has shaped the product most significantly. The demands it places on the system — real-time decisioning, multi-jurisdictional compliance, the need to act on a player signal within the same session — are more complex and more consequential than almost anything else in the portfolio. iGaming, Colman notes, continues to grow as a segment, with gamification, loyalty, and usability the current areas of expansion.
Industry perspective
"From a client perspective the big thing when starting out is change management and the organisational shift that it takes to implement Optimove."
— Motti Colman, VP of Revenue, Gaming, Optimove
Gamification mechanics like spin wheels create engagement — but Colman argues the real question is whether they build loyalty to a brand or dependency on a mechanic. Image iGaming Review
The Smartico Acquisition: Two Philosophies, One Category
On April 2026 Optimove announced the acquisition of Smartico, a CRM marketing platform founded in 2019 that built its product around gamification and loyalty from the outset. Both companies will continue to operate as fully independent businesses, retaining their own brands, teams, pricing, and product roadmaps. The Smartico founders remain in control of strategy and day-to-day operations.
The distinction between the two companies is something Colman describes carefully. Optimove came from data analytics and added gamification as a capability — its current gamification product, Optimove Gamify, was itself built from the acquisition of Adact in early 2025. Smartico was built from a different starting point. Its founders identified gamification as the door opener: the mechanism that brings a player into a relationship with an operator and creates the conditions for loyalty to develop. CRM automation was built around that philosophy rather than the other way around. 'They saw gamification as the way in, and loyalty first,' Colman says. 'They saw these two working together.' Smartico describes itself as a real-time gamification and loyalty suite with CRM automation built specifically for iGaming operators, and its approach attracted operators for whom engagement mechanics were the starting point rather than an add-on.
Colman is direct about what the acquisition means competitively. "Today Optimove's solution and Smartico are competing. In time they may overlap. It is a knowledge perspective." That framing is deliberate. The acquisition is not a consolidation play in the conventional sense — it is a decision to back both models simultaneously and let the market determine how they develop in relation to each other.
The gamification question also looks different depending on where an operator sits. In emerging markets — South Africa, Brazil, parts of Latin America and Asia — operators are still building player bases. Gamification functions as an acquisition mechanism; the dynamic is a landgrab and speed matters more than refinement. In mature regulated markets, a player is likely to hold accounts on two or three platforms simultaneously, and loyalty cannot be assumed from registration. It has to be earned through every interaction. The platform is the same. The market reality is not.
Lottoland operates across approximately 15 markets with over 21 million customers — its three-year CRM consolidation project with Optimove is one of the most detailed operator accounts of what implementation actually looks like. © Schneider, Timon / Alamy
Before the Five-Minute Campaign: What Change Management Actually Looks Like
The headline results associated with Optimove are well established. FDJ United, with more than 33 million players across multiple markets, reduced campaign creation from six weeks to one day.
Caesars Online Casino moved from five days to five minutes. These figures are cited regularly, and they are compelling. What is discussed less often is what precedes them.
"From a client perspective the big thing when starting out is change management and the organisational shift that it takes to implement Optimove," Colman says.
Each operator arrives at implementation with a different reality: legacy systems built over years, teams organised around manual processes, data sitting in disconnected silos. The platform does not resolve those problems automatically. It requires the operator to confront them.
Mark Wilson, head of marketing technology at Lottoland, gave a detailed account of what that journey looks like in practice in a presentation at Optimove Connect (youtu.be/QjB-X-cI_ko). Lottoland is an iGaming operator active in approximately 15 markets with over 21 million customers.
When Wilson joined, his role did not exist. The company had three businesses, a fragmented tech stack they mapped internally as the spaghetti diagram, and no clear picture of what was talking to what. Sending a single email campaign required three separate tools and a four or five step manual process that generated significant human error and inconsistent reporting.
The consolidation project that followed ultimately spanned three years. Wilson had initially estimated 12 to 18 months, but the effort evolved into a much broader operational transformation as Lottoland revamped internal systems, rebuilt data flows, and aligned multiple business units around a unified CRM infrastructure designed to fully capitalize on Optimove’s capabilities. Email migration alone involved moving hundreds of campaigns into Optimove's native email tool which took close to nine months. In Wilson’s words, it felt at times like changing the tyres while the car was still moving.
At the same time, Lottoland worked closely with Optimove on advanced integrations, including one of the first Snowflake-to-Snowflake data sharing projects between Optimove and a client. Wilson described the process as involving significant joint learning as both companies worked to close the loop between Optimove and Lottoland’s internal systems in real time. By the end, campaign setup touchpoints had been reduced from 64 to 8, approximately 300 hours a month of CRM time had been freed, and annual cost savings reached around one million euros. Wilson's closing advice to the room was simple: expect it to take longer.
Colman recognises this pattern. The organisational shift required before the platform delivers its full capability is, he argues, the part of the conversation operators most need to have before they commit. Optimove runs an annual two-day user conference in London focused specifically on how clients work through change management. Each operator also works with a dedicated Optimove contact throughout implementation. "Each team has a contact at Optimove who works hand in hand with the organisation to set this up," he says. The platform is not a switch that gets flipped. It is a system that has to be built into the way an organisation works.
The efficiency gains that follow — the ability to shift a campaign within minutes of a live event, to respond to a player signal in the same session, to run what Colman describes as right person, right offer, right time decisioning at scale — depend on that foundation being in place. "An individual can do more with less," he says of the Positionless Marketing model. "Marketing fatigue is real — we aim to be efficient, not overbearing." But the efficiency only becomes real once the organisational groundwork has been done. That is the part of the story the headline numbers do not tell.
The market Optimove helped build in iGaming looks different now than it did when Colman joined in 2015. The platform is more capable, the client base is larger, and the competitive landscape has consolidated significantly — the Smartico acquisition being the most recent signal of that direction. What has not changed is the fundamental challenge operators face when they decide to build their CRM operations around a platform this comprehensive. The technology is available.
The question, as it has always been, is whether the organisation is ready to use it.
Further Reading & Key Sources
Optimove 2026: Lottoland presentation YouTube
GlobeNewswire, 6 April 2026: Optimove to acquire Smartico
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