William Hill acquires Grand Parade for £13.5m
William Hill has acquired betting and gaming digital solutions company Grand Parade for £13.5 million (€16 million/$17.9 million).
The transaction will comprise cash and shares, with the bookmaker to issue 495,048 new ordinary shares of 10 pence each to Grand Parade.
Founded in 2007, Grand Parade creates applications, websites and e-commerce platforms for the sports betting, gaming and media industries.
Philip Bowcock, interim chief executive of William Hill, said: “Bringing the Grand Parade team into William Hill will rapidly ramp up the scale of our development team by backfilling existing resource gaps and also enhance our creative capabilities.
“This enables us to capitalise on the potential of our Trafalgar front-end platform by accelerating our product development and also to support the work with OpenBet to build our new back-end platform.”
Meanwhile, William Hill has entered into a partnership with English Premier League football club Everton and the Scottish Football Association (SFA).
The two-year Everton deal will run from the 2016-17 season until the end of the 2017-18 campaign.
William Hill will become the club’s official European betting partner and benefit from branding placement on various surfaces inside the team’s Goodison Park home stadium, including LED advertising boards and interview backdrops.
In addition, the bookmaker will provide an improved betting concourse at the ground and utilise the club’s platforms to connect with fans in the UK and across Europe.
Alan McTavish, head of commercial at Everton, said: “Ahead of an exciting new season we look forward to working together with William Hill, a company that prides itself on innovation, history and heritage just like Everton, and developing a long-term partnership that covers traditional betting and the emerging interactive markets.”
The bookmaker has also signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the SFA to complement a similar agreement with the English Football Association.
William Hill will exchange information with the two governing bodies related to suspected betting irregularities in England and Scotland.
The agreements include issues such as match fixing and insider betting on all events under the jurisdiction of the organisations.
Peter McLaughlin, security and integrity officer at the Scottish FA, said: “The Scottish FA is committed to keeping the national game clean in the face of the growing global challenges of match-fixing and other integrity-related issues.
“This MoU will enable us to work proactively and share information to protect the integrity and reputation of Scottish football.”
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