Accelerating delivery and enhancing player protection for tombola

To overcome delivery pressure and modernise its platform, tombola engaged us in its first embedded tech partnership. Our collaboration focused on two parallel workstreams - streamlining the player experience and strengthening player protection. As trust grew, so did our impact - scaling from a small, focused squad to more than 30 engineers embedded across tombola's teams.

Overview

tombola is Britain’s biggest bingo site, known for its strong sense of community, commitment to responsible gambling, and player-first approach. Acquired in 2022 by iGaming giant Flutter, tombola became its highest potential growth brand within the group, but it faced rising expectations and pressure to clear a sizable backlog while meeting challenging delivery deadlines.

To realise this potential in a competitive market, tombola needed to modernise its core player experience by streamlining its onboarding, payments, and promotions journeys. All while maintaining the brand’s low-cost model and commitment to player protection.

The bingo operator needed a partner to accelerate delivery and provide support in meeting ambitious timelines. Aware of our embedded model from our work within the wider Flutter group, tombola initiated a partnership in late 2023 to tackle this challenge head-on.

Opportunity

The partnership began with a small, focused engagement at tombola’s Sunderland HQ. Our initial team of three, consisting of delivery and engineering, was embedded to specifically support App Consolidation. With early success proven quickly, it led to a second team being appointed to focus on Game Engine services. This approach demonstrated the value of our embedded model, showcasing our ways of working and laying the foundation for a deeper collaboration.

Spending time on-site proved crucial. Face-to-face meetings allowed us to review backlogs directly with tombola’s teams, giving us a deep understanding of their goals and priorities. This in-person alignment revealed significant opportunities to improve key player journeys in onboarding, payments, promotions, and in-game chat.

We kept one commercial goal in mind: to streamline the onboarding and deposit journey to reduce player drop-off. To do this we formed bespoke, tailored squads, embedded within tombola's teams to contribute to high-priority workstreams. As a result, our engagement scaled significantly - and by mid-2024, our team had grown to over 25 people. We sat down with each internal team to plan upcoming work and define the objectives that would elevate the player experience.

Solution

We contributed to several key initiatives to improve the player journey, including the migration to the BR-DGE payment platform, the creation of tooling for automated bank transfers, and the integration of the Signicat onboarding system across the UK, Italy, and Spain. As such, transactions became seamless, easy, and more intentional for players. These initiatives made the core deposit and onboarding journeys smoother, directly addressing the business’s need to improve player conversion.

We were also able to support tombola’s commitment to responsible gambling. A key contribution was the delivery of a Financial Vulnerability Check (FVC) tool, a project that automated player risk checks, in just six weeks. This was complemented by our work integrating ClearStake, an open banking system, to support enhanced due diligence.

Outcome

To date, our partnership has delivered significant, measurable outcomes across performance, finance, and player experience. tombola has gained greater confidence in meeting its strategic roadmap, and squads with embedded support saw an immediate and notable uplift in delivery. Replacing manual cheques with automated bank transfers for player withdrawals cut transaction costs by 52%, while providing faster access to funds.

These gains translated directly into a safer, modernised player experience. Streamlining the Signicat and BR-DGE journeys reduced friction during registration and deposit, while the rapid delivery of the FVC tool strengthened player protection and eased the manual burden on its Customer Experience teams.

What began as focused delivery support has grown into a long-term partnership; one shaped by shared goals and built on trusted collaboration. Today, over 30 of our team members are embedded across tombola, contributing across squads and disciplines. Beyond day-to-day delivery, our involvement now extends to leadership sessions and strategic AI workshops intended to improve the player experience.