Great Olympics for Sporting Index

Sporting Index has reported a record breaking Olympics in terms of turnover at London 2012. The spread betting firm took nine times as many bets as it did at Beijing four years ago and 70 percent of its customers who had been active betting over the past three weeks had at least one bet on the Olympics.

The mobile channel was an important contributor, with one in three punters wagering via mobile devices.

Four years ago in Beijing, Sporting Index took bets on 16 different sports; by 2012 this had soared to providing betting action on all 36 sports, with wagers placed on every one of the 302 medal events.

The top betting sports were soccer and tennis, but swimming, basketball, athletics, boxing and cycling all proved very popular, a company spokesman revealed this week.

Sporting Solutions, the B2B software and data services division of the Sporting Index group, provided some of the world’s top bookmakers with a fixed-odds pricing service.

Feedback from the industry was that turnover was much higher than expected. Initial estimates had suggested somewhere between GBP 20-GBP 40 million would be bet in the UK, but the final figure appears to be nearer GBP 80-100 million, the spokesman said.

Mark Maydon, commercial director at the Sporting Index Group, said that Olympic betting had exceeded the group’s expectations.