A betting brand can survive for generations and still find itself waiting for its own software. The next feature needs an integration. The integration needs a change to an older system. The change joins a queue. Somewhere behind the familiar name, the business has lost the ability to move at its chosen speed.
That is the customer Fincore wants. The London company builds the software underneath sportsbooks, casinos and lotteries, then helps operators change it. Its proposition has an unusually practical destination: customers should be able to take ownership of the technology and decide what happens next. For an industry selling anticipation by the second, waiting for a development slot is a curious handicap.
The Pools needed more than a fresh coat of paint
In January 2026, Fincore announced that it had delivered a new core platform for The Pools. The problem described in the announcement was familiar to anyone responsible for an established digital business: older systems were slowing product development, making integrations harder and restricting future choices.
Fincore brought sportsbook, gaming, payments and compliance flows into a modular architecture. The company says the relaunch happened on schedule and without disruption, with The Pools retaining full technology ownership. Those are supplier-reported results, but the customer attached its name to the account. Pools chief executive James Arnold praised the team’s delivery and working relationship.
The telling detail is what had become difficult first: making changes. A system can continue processing business while becoming a poor foundation for the next version of that business. The Pools project gives Fincore’s ownership argument a recognisable face.
Before the betting slip, the bank
Fincore’s history begins with two colleagues at Nomura International, Soeren Christensen and Predrag Popovic. Their predecessor business, Finsoft, dates to 1995. Its early territory was investment-banking risk software. The current legal entity arrived in November 2006 as Finsoft Systems Limited, took another Finsoft name in 2007 and became Fincore Limited in 2009.
That lineage helps explain a portfolio that can look eccentric from outside: financial data, business processes, gambling systems and recognition technology. Risk and transactions run through it. GoldenRace, which lists Fincore as a partner, describes roots in complex banking software and subsequent work across central banking, government, aerospace and gaming.
There is even a railway detour. A UK innovation competition listed Fincore in RODIO, a project for detecting railway intrusions and obstacles. The 2018 document assigned it proposed project costs of £170,736 and a proposed £102,442 grant. It is a small, concrete reminder that the company’s engineering interests have extended well beyond a casino screen.
Buy the useful pieces
Fincore launched TRI in May 2024 around three principal components: Hub, Sportsbook and Gaming. Hub brings together player accounts, bonus functions, loyalty and data. The broader proposition is modular: an operator can adopt individual components or combine them, with Fincore handling customisation and launch work before a handover.
In the launch newsletter, chief executive Mateja Popovic described those modules as a starting point for a customer’s tailored platform. He also acknowledged that buying everything together is not always feasible. That concession matters. An operator may have useful software already paid for, employees trained to use it and partners connected to it. Replacing all of that has consequences beyond a purchasing decision.
TRI therefore belongs in the build-or-buy conversation, with room between the familiar extremes. The customer gets an existing body of software and people who understand it, while retaining a route toward greater independence. The commercial offer includes proprietary technology, integration and engineering work. It is a relationship requiring a specification, a delivery plan and agreed ownership terms.
“At our heart, we’ve always been a tech solutions company”
Mateja Popovic, CEO · October 2025
The plumbing is the work
The breadth of Fincore’s services makes more sense when viewed from an operator’s desk. Its legacy-refresh offer targets the parts of an existing system that impede progress. Its roadmap service adds engineering capacity and automation to help overloaded teams finish planned work. Its interoperability practice addresses how separate systems exchange information and interpret it consistently.
Those jobs overlap, but they are not interchangeable. Connecting two applications can leave the people using them with duplicated work or conflicting information. Fincore explicitly argues for common data logic as well as working interfaces. The practical question is whether the combined operation behaves coherently after the connection has been made.
Its AI and data work starts at that same unglamorous level: organising information, automating its movement and fitting it into live processes. For a buyer, this suggests a useful order of inquiry. Identify the delayed decision or manual task, trace the information it requires, then examine which system prevents that information from being useful. An expensive algorithm will have little to do if the relevant records never arrive.
Everi illustrates the supplier-facing side of the business. Fincore says it helped build Vi, a mobile wallet and loyalty platform linking payments, casino systems and other parts of a resort visit. The project included documentation and training for technology transfer. Fincore reports delivery in under 12 months. The appeal here is additional engineering capacity with specialist knowledge of the systems being joined.
A prediction needs somewhere to go
Fincore’s April 2026 Sportradar integration puts a sharper point on the data story. Sportradar’s VAIX supplies AI recommendations and forecasts about player behaviour. Fincore supplies the means to turn those signals into actions within the operator’s existing environment. The two businesses have different jobs in the same chain.
The distinction is easy to overlook in a demonstration. A prediction on a screen can look finished. In a live business, someone or something still has to apply it, at the right time, using the systems already holding accounts, campaigns and transactions. The integration is intended to shorten that journey for personalised sports and casino experiences.
TRI Bonus Engine makes the architecture tangible. It sits alongside an operator’s player account management system, or PAM, and connects with the PAM and customer relationship management software through APIs. Campaign teams can define eligibility and rewards, with budget controls, permissions and audit capabilities. The product’s purpose is to let a bonus change without turning it into an entire core-platform project.
Fincore identifies the underlying frustration as a mismatch in timing: campaigns can take days to arrange while player behaviour changes in seconds. The engine is designed to respond to individual events or combinations of activity. That is an operational claim about responsiveness; a buyer still needs to judge the quality, cost and appropriateness of the campaign itself.
Even another platform supplier can buy a piece
The SB22 relationship offers a different test of modularity. A November 2023 agreement put Fincore’s facial recognition technology into SB22’s self-service betting kiosk proposition. SB22 already had its own betting platform. It wanted a particular capability.
The announced uses included identifying excluded players, preventing fraud and personalising service. Fincore said it tailored its algorithms for the partner’s deployment. This is a useful illustration of where the company sits in the market: it can provide a full platform, but it can also supply technology inside somebody else’s product. Its customer may itself be a software company.
That does not make modularity exclusive to Fincore. EveryMatrix also markets configurable and turnkey gaming technology spanning accounts, wallets, casino and sports. Fincore’s more specific argument combines reusable software with engineers who fit it into an existing operation and, where agreed, transfer the technology. A comparison should examine the actual handover and responsibilities in each contract.
The people behind the handover
In June 2024, Fincore appointed Dominic Le Garsmeur chief product officer. His earlier career included PartyGaming, Nektan and the OpenBet business through successive owners. The appointment put an executive familiar with casino products, player accounts and aggregation in charge of product strategy alongside Popovic.
By October 2025, a refreshed brand was making the company’s services identity more explicit. Fincore described a commercial strategy aimed at operators and B2B suppliers needing modernisation, integration and faster delivery. Its stated working principles emphasise integrity, careful engineering and adaptability.
A less polished glimpse of the culture came in a 2023 company post thanking Christensen and Predrag Popovic and welcoming a new leadership chapter. The celebration involved French and Spanish wines paired with cheese. Even the people responsible for transaction systems apparently permit some decisions to be made by taste.
Ownership comes with homework
The price question belongs with the scope question. Software rights, customisation, migration, integration and continuing support are different things to purchase. Buyers evaluating Fincore’s model should put each on the same cost sheet, together with the internal team required after handover. Ownership can change who sets priorities; it does not remove the work of running software.
That also defines the fit. A business comfortable with a managed platform and shared development priorities may place less value on taking control. An operator with a distinctive product plan and people prepared to maintain it has a clearer reason to investigate. The useful lesson to copy is to make the future operating arrangement part of the initial buying decision.
Fincore’s proposition is most convincing at that level of detail. Which parts can stay? Which need rebuilding? Who will understand the system when the project team leaves? For the customer tired of waiting to change its own business, the keys matter. So does knowing how to drive.