Betfair Exchange December Newsletter: Football markets innovations and more

• Find out what's new on the Betfair Exchange in December

• Sportradar means faster and fairer markets

• Markets with no passive bet delays to be trialled this month

Sportradar will enhance Betfair Exchange football markets

We are in the final stages of integrating the Sportradar football incident feed, which will significantly enhance market management, reduce in-play bet delays, and improve VAR management.

This integration will result in faster, fairer, and more efficient Exchange market operations. Several competitions will benefit from quicker suspensions, offering greater protection to market makers during in-play.

Due to changes in data rights across various competitions, the percentage of matches with a five-second bet delay has decreased from 97% to 80% over the past two years, directly impacting matched volume.

We anticipate that the Sportradar integration will initially increase the number of matches with a five-second bet delay to approximately 88%, with further improvements pushing this figure back over 90% by February/March.

No delays on passive bets

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As we continue to explore new ways to improve the Exchange landscape, experimenting based on customer feedback has become an increasing priority. A historic survey of API customers named "no delays for passive bets" as the second most impactful product change behind live football data (which remains unviable).

The new matching logic, which will be trialled from December 2024 deep into next year, will dynamically read the current market state when bets are placed. If the requested price is not going to match during the bet delay, the bet will appear almost instantly as unmatched rather than after the delay period.

Bets that aren't going to match instantly to a bet already in the market are what we call "passive bets".​​ This change will materially improve the Exchange experience for all as "market takers". It will see market prices twice as quickly while market makers will be able to post earlier with the safety that they have more time to deliberate on whether they still want to offer that price after, for example, two to three seconds.

By the time you read this, we will have finished our first wave of real testing on some fake matches which will be voided rather than settled. In the week commencing 2 December we will offer 1-2 ITF matches per day with no delays for passive bets enabled. Bets will be settled as normal!

Events cannot be signposted on the API yet, but we will list the applicable events on the Betfair Developer Forum and Betcode channel. You can subscribe to automated announcements on the developer forum. We expect to have them listed no later than 9:30am each day starting on Tuesday.

Betfair Developer Forum - Announcements

Betcode Slack Channel

Moving into 2025 we will keep our focus on ITF throughout January before switching to Challenger events from February/March.

These events will be offered through a new bet matcher which can only handle a maximum of 20 events at a time.

We have delivered a vast number of changes in the last two years to improve stability and get to this point. More work is required to scale this exciting new feature into new sports which we hope will happen in 2025.

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