Ladbrokes in partnership agreement with WorldSpreads

WorldSpreads Group plc has announced that it has entered into an exclusive agreement with Ladbrokes plc (‘Ladbrokes’) to provide its financial spread betting service to the global client base of Ladbrokes.

Under the terms of the partnership, WorldSpreads will provide a financial trading service (www.financials.ladbrokes.com) offering financial spreadbets on market assets such as stock indexes, individual equities, forex pairs, commodities and interest rates. Ladbrokes plans to promote the spread betting service to its extensive database of customers using its current marketing channels under the Ladbrokes brand.

WorldSpreads, which was established in 2000 and is headed Conor Foley already offers a white-label to sports-betting company Victor Chandler. Conor Foley, WorldSpreads Group CEO, commented: ‘This partnership is consistent with one of our long-term growth strategies which is to form alliances with companies that have complementary client databases. We are confident that the financial spread betting product will be favourably received by Ladbrokes’ customers and we look forward to working with the team at Ladbrokes in building an additional successful revenue channel for both them and us.’

Christopher Bell, Chief Executive of Ladbrokes plc, commented: ‘Spread betting is an increasingly popular choice for people wishing to bet on financial markets and we believe there is significant potential for a brand like Ladbrokes to extend its appeal to the broader betting and gaming market.’

No details on the partnership structure or terms were provided in the RNS announcement or deal structure has been provided in the announcement. However, my experience suggests that these partnerships are usually structured in either of two ways -:

- Based on deal flow – can can be expensive as WorldSpreads would have to pay Ladbrokes for its share of referred business based on the volume of referred client trades.
- Based on profit per trade – which would probably be more beneficial for WordlSpreads as a payback would only be triggered if the trade generates WorldSpreads a profit.

Comments: Irrespective for the deal structure this is a major contract win for WorldSpreads and further proof on how spread betting is becoming more and more mainstream. It is interesting to note that the share price of WorldSpreads has risen some 30% since January.

Tags: ladbrokes, spread betting, worldspreads

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at 8:38 am and is filed under Industry Happenings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.