A high-spending player who claims every bonus and immediately withdraws could actually be worth less to an operator than a modest, loyal regular who rarely needs an incentive.
That counterintuitive argument sits at the heart of a new strategic framework outlined by Ionut Negrescu, chief Europe delivery officer for iGaming at Software Mind.
Negrescu, who leads large-scale IT service delivery and growth strategy at the firm, argues that the way operators currently define player value is fundamentally broken.
Software Mind, a global technology partner specialising in AI-powered consultancy and software development, has identified three core areas where operators are leaving money on the table through poorly structured promotions.
Those areas are unifying promotional tools across platforms, personalising bonuses at a granular level, and building a player value model that every part of the business can actually rely on.
Regulatory pressure has made the problem harder to ignore, particularly in the UK, where the introduction of a 10x bonus cap forced operators to update and test every bonus-issuing system independently.
That fragmented response exposed just how siloed most promotional infrastructure had become, with different systems operating under different logic and no single source of truth.
Negrescu draws a parallel to the banking sector to illustrate what a better structure could look like, noting that branches still serve customers in their own way, but every transaction follows the same rules and ends up in the right account.
Critically, he is not advocating for ripping out existing technology all at once, but rather for building compliance and value logic directly into a central promotional engine.
When that engine is properly constructed, the same rules apply across every brand and market without requiring separate updates every time regulations shift.
The player value model that emerges from this approach is designed to feed CRM systems, VIP management teams, and customer support simultaneously, so no department is working from a different picture of who a player actually is.
That consistency matters because a disjointed view of player value leads to misdirected spending, rewarding the wrong customers with bonuses that erode margin rather than build loyalty.
Personalisation, in Negrescu’s framework, extends beyond simply targeting the right audience segment and into shaping the bonus itself based on demonstrated behaviour over time.
Software Mind positions its AI, cloud and data capabilities as the infrastructure layer that makes this kind of dynamic, behaviour-driven promotion possible at scale across competitive markets.
For operators still running promotional tools that were patched together during the UK cap rollout, the argument is that short-term fixes have now become a long-term structural liability worth addressing.
