Meeting hyperscale demand to become #1 in America

Originally founded in Edinburgh, FanDuel Group is a company that is harnessing technology to innovate the sports betting industry to make it more engaging, more entertaining, and safer for players. Amid the widening legalisation of sports betting in the United States in recent years, the company agreed to merge with the U.S. operations of Flutter Entertainment to create FanDuel Group in 2018.

Since 2018, FanDuel has seen explosive growth in demand for its gambling games and services. This growth has been fueled by the legalisation of sports betting across a number of major U.S. states - including New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana and West Virginia. To seize the huge market opportunity on offer, FanDuel needed a reliable delivery partner to support it in scaling its digital operations without compromising on the quality of its already brilliant in-house team.

Given the enormity of the opportunity in play for FanDuel, xDesign quickly span up three specialist engineering teams for the client in the space of just two months. Within just two years, xDesign now has over 10 teams working in three different continents, and across five different verticals for the client; including sportsbook, wallet, and account. Each is supporting FanDuel to realise its growth potential via the optimisation of its consumer-facing digital products.

In order to support FanDuel’s ambitions to scale at pace, xDesign better integrated its vertical casino promotions within the wider group’s Central Promotions Platform (CPP). These changes have subsequently been rolled out across features owned by some of the group’s other brands too. In addition, xDesign was embedded into FanDuel’s ‘Maintainers Group’ too which is responsible for the overall code quality of the platform and governs any pull requests. When it comes to building new features for the client, it is given full visibility as to what functionality already exists across the group’s various other brands and tech stacks - all with the aim of supporting the repurposing of existing tech and features where possible. This unique position provides xDesign with a constant sounding board from other members so that it can ensure all the new features it releases work across the groups various brands. As a result, FanDuel has the peace of mind that high standards of quality are being met and that it can move quickly to seize new opportunities.

Given FanDuel’s sophisticated, multi-state operations, it needed functionality within its digital estate to manage a number of eventualities. Responding to the brief, we delivered a multi-state management tool. The tool which was predominantly built for the organisation’s Risk and Trading team allows them to perform a number of bet operations like settlements or killing live bets ad hoc across multiple states. We also built an alerting tool that is integrated with a websocket solution to alert traders of live bet liabilities and flag any live risks that need to be managed. Not only has the tool given FanDuel the ability to better manage risk within the multiple states and territories it operates in, it’s now also going to be turned into a group tool available to other brands in the Flutter Group.

As well as introducing new teams, features, and approaches, xDesign has invested heavily in developing its partnership with FanDuel. One important aspect of this has been by supporting it in building digital teams that have the increased agility, skills and knowledge they need to grow along with the company. In addition, we’ve collaborated with the client to optimise workflows and agile delivery across the organisation. We’ve also coached members of its Quality Assurance and Automation teams to provide maturity modelling approaches - these support the company to scale consistently at a time of rapid expansion. Coaching has also taken the form of face-to-face collaborative away days, with FanDuel’s Porto team coming together with xDesign in Edinburgh to enhance project communication and cross-team collaboration.

In 2022, xDesign and FanDuel launched a joint community fund of £250,000 to bolster support for digital skills and opportunities in the Scottish tech scene. This serves as a true testament to the belief that is shared by both companies that it's people that drive great tech solutions. The fund will be used to sponsor community events, educational programmes and a raft of other initiatives to fuel Scotland’s digital skills pipeline for the future.