Exchange values

Devine was attracted to the role at Betfair by its business model, that of being an exchange, which brings buyers and sellers together, a model he says delivers better value for money. "When I came here I was blown away by the people as well, it was the best move I ever made." Devine is now a big fan of the exchange business model and sites eBay, the global auction site, as a great example of the exchange business. "It is a very good way of buying and selling, there is no person in the middle taking a commission," he says. It is the simplicity of being a technology platform offering a service to buyers and sellers to utilize that appeals to Devine. "A lot of things will go to a exchange model because the internet enables it," he believes. Betfair has been a significant wind of change in the betting world and the previous system was open to abuse and many believe customers were not getting a service.

"The integrity aspect we have here means we have a record of every transaction. One charge was that we encourage abuse, but we brought an audit trail to the sector, there is no hiding," Devine says. Betfair has challenged the market and many observers welcome the transparency it has brought to a market that had been clouded in mystery. For consumers, Devine says this is good news, "If you know the market or game you are coming from a good place."

A techie throughout his career, Devine evidently is interested in business, especially exchange based business and people. "As a tech you realize that it is not about technology, it is about people," he says. Devine did a degree in IT before joining Logica the IT services company, which led to a move to investment banking and then on to a dot-com start up and NTL the cable company before returning to investment banking.

"IT is very very important and can really add business value," Devine says. Adding value and communicating that are central to the CIO/CTO role according to Devine. "You must question your effect and value. It very easy to not do that," he says. As a result Devine believes he must challenge himself and his team. He has undergone coaching, which he says "doesn't give you the answers, it makes you ask the right questions."

As a great listener, Devine also has a knack of communicating and he sees his role as communicating what IT can and does do for the organization to the organization. He carries out briefings on the IT world for senior people in the management. "To most people it is just a black box that they don't understand. I can present it to non-technology people in a way they understand. To really understand something, it helps to personalize things and it really helps if they have can have someone that they can ask questions of."

As well as being the human face of technology at Betfair, Devine also pens Rorie's Ramblings, a weekly email to the Betfair staff, written in the informal tone of a blog, on technology issues. "Email is a really powerful tool for one-to-many communications. There is nothing like it. I couldn't do Ramblings in any other way."

Devine is quick to point out that as communications method, email has limits and as a promoter of face-to-face communications he knows its limitations. "When email is used for one-to-one communications there can be confrontation and aggression, people are using the wrong tool for one-to-one situation.

Punters choose their own odds and bet against each other in the Betfair exchange business model and it is the first betting company that allows its customers to place bets once the game has started and bet as it proceeds. Launched in June, 2000 Betfair partly based its business model on the New York Stock Exchange. Its growth as a business has been incredible. In the 2007 its profits were up by 65 per cent and it received four billion page impressions a week, which is about 15 million transactions being processed a day, which Betfair says is more than all the European stock exchanges put together. Much of its growth is from outside of the UK and as a result new operational units have been set up in Italy, Malta and Romania. The ability to produce an audit trail for all of its transactions means that Betfair was the first online gambling company to be awarded ISO 27001 accreditation for information security management.

At the heart of this business phenomena is its technology. Devine said he is responsible for "one of the five hottest Oracle" installations on the planet. Unlike many online gambling operations, Betfair never entered the US market. In 2006 President George W Bush made online gambling illegal in the US, which dented the growth of rivals like 888 Holdings. "We never offered our service to the US from day one, our competition did and the US was half of the world gambling market," Devine explains. "The difference is, we want to be a blue chip company, so we only operate in jurisdictions that provide a licence. We have a multi-layered approach of location finding, we make our best endeavors to find where people are when they place a bet." If an American tries to place a bet with Betfair, the company is confident it can trace where they are and prevent them placing the bet and contravening US law. Devine says these policies are all part of the long term blue chip vision of Betfair. It played the risky hand of keeping out of the US market, but as recent Queens awards and financial figures show, they have made the right bet.