The Playa has just brought one of the iGaming industry's most experienced VIP operators on board as a Strategic Advisor. The timing is no accident. With personalisation moving from competitive edge to baseline expectation, the company is positioning its new VIP Intelligence product to reshape how operators manage their most valuable players.
Personalisation has become one of the most discussed and least understood disciplines in iGaming. Every operator claims to do it. Few actually deliver it in the form players experience as genuinely tailored. The Playa, a personalisation engine business that has built its reputation on operator-centric product development, is now pushing into one of the most commercially significant and historically underserved areas of operator activity: VIP management.
The catalyst for that push is the appointment of Gali as Strategic Advisor, alongside the rollout of VIP Intelligence, a dedicated product built specifically for the teams that handle an operator's highest-value players. Gali brings a career that began in land-based poker VIP lounges and grew through Head of VIP roles into B2C operations consulting, giving him the kind of cross-operator perspective that most VIP professionals never get to see. Viktoriia represents The Playa's product and leadership perspective, having led the development of the personalisation engine that now powers lobby recommendations, early player activation and churn prevention for operators across multiple European markets.
In the conversation that follows, both share their views on what VIP Intelligence actually delivers, where the personalisation discipline is heading, and why the next 18 to 24 months may be the defining window for operators looking to build a durable competitive edge.
Q1: Gali, you've just joined The Playa as a Strategic Advisor. What drew you to this role, and why now?
Gali: What drew me in, first and foremost, was the people and the company. The Playa has always kept the operator at the centre of how they think and build, and that's rarer than it sounds in this industry.
That same clarity of focus is also why the timing felt right. We've reached the stage where AI technology and expertise are ready to intersect with practical application, not just at a theoretical level. The Playa has the right foundation and direction to lead that next phase, and I wanted to be part of shaping it.
Q2: Viktoriia, why was bringing in a Strategic Advisor with Gali's background a priority for The Playa right now?
Viktoriia: We've built a strong product. Our personalisation engine delivers measurable results for operators across lobby recommendations, early player activation, and churn prevention. But as we grow, we want to make sure we're solving the right problems in the right order for our clients. VIP management is one of the most commercially important and yet most underserved areas. Gali brings deep practical knowledge from the operator side. He knows what a VIP team actually needs, how VIP relationships work in reality, and where technology can genuinely help versus where it oversimplifies. Having that perspective embedded in how we develop our solutions is invaluable.
Q3: You've developed a dedicated VIP Intelligence product. What does it actually give operators that they don't have today, and how does Gali's expertise sharpen it?
Viktoriia: Today, VIP team work is largely manual, and that's understandable. It's sensitive work where a wrong move can have real consequences for the relationship and the business. But that also means teams are often operating without the full picture.
What VIP Intelligence gives operators is exactly that picture. A VIP manager can see the performance of their entire portfolio at a glance, access data insights on the behaviour of each individual player, and pick up on signals, whether that's early VIP potential or churn risk, before they become obvious. On top of that, the product surfaces recommended actions, so teams aren't just informed, they're guided on what to do next.
Gali: What I try to bring to the table is the translation layer that operators don't have today. We are building VIP Intelligence on the foundation of years of real VIP experience, understanding how the discipline has evolved and what it demands in practice, and turning that into actionable insights and decisions that VIP teams can act on in their daily work. Technology acts not as a replacement, but as an enhancement to the human factor that is at the core of great VIP management.
Q4: What should operators who are looking to improve their player personalisation or VIP strategy take away from this partnership?
Gali: The key takeaway is that VIP Intelligence is built for VIP teams by VIP experts who have lived this work from the inside, starting as VIP managers, growing into leadership, and ultimately helping operators build their VIP strategies and train their teams from the ground up. This isn't methodology developed at a distance. It's built by people who understand what these teams actually face every day.
What this partnership brings together is two worlds: a technological layer that can process and interpret data at scale, and a human-led layer that knows what VIP management actually demands in practice. That combination is what makes this the most operator-centric and VIP-relevant personalisation tool in the market.
Viktoriia: And that personalisation is not something you implement once and forget. It evolves as your player base evolves. What we're building, and what Gali's involvement strengthens, is a solution that grows with operators, gives them early intelligence on their most valuable players, and helps them act on it before their competitors do. The window to build that edge is now. Operators who invest in it today will be in a very different position two years from now.
Q5: Gali, you started as a VIP manager and grew into VIP leadership and strategy across operators. For B2B readers who may not know your background, walk us through that journey and what shaped your view of what world-class VIP management looks like.
Gali: My career started in land-based poker and a VIP poker lounge, so my entire immersion into this industry has been VIP-centric from day one.
As my career progressed, I moved into Head of VIP roles where the work went much deeper, building analytics and reporting systems, creating pre-VIP programmes, managing dedicated sales and retention teams, and navigating regulatory change in some of the most complex markets.
It was only when I went into consulting, around five years ago, that I got a broader exposure of the ecosystem. Most VIP managers are confined to a single view, namely the company they work for. Being a VIP and B2C Operations Consultant gave me the awareness of repeated mistakes happening across the industry. That awareness was invaluable.
It was at that point that I started collaborating with companies like Gaming Operations Academy, training on best practices, pioneering new approaches and strategies, pulling in insights and trials and errors from multiple operators on a global scale. What that allowed me to create is, in my opinion, one of the most competitive strategic directions that VIP can take.
Q6: Viktoriia, The Playa's personalisation engine is already delivering measurable results across lobby recommendations, early player activation and churn prevention. Can you share a couple of the most rewarding wins you've seen with operator clients, and what stood out about how those teams worked with the product?
Viktoriia: One that stands out is a six-month lobby personalisation rollout across two European markets. We ran an 80/20 A/B test and tracked every monthly cohort. Average turnover per user grew 12 to 16%, active days increased, and players started exploring significantly more of the lobby. An important part of these results is their consistency, sustained across all six months, in both markets. The operator didn't spend more on marketing to get there. They just made it easier for players to find games they'd actually enjoy.
What made it work, beyond the product, was having a committed champion on the operator's side, someone who genuinely owned the initiative internally. We see that pattern consistently: when there's a person driving it from within, the impact is noticeably stronger.
Q7: Gali, looking back at your time leading VIP strategy on the operator side, when were the moments where you wished you had a tool like VIP Intelligence in front of you, and what would it have changed?
Gali: Knowing what VIP Intelligence is and what it's going to become, I can say with absolute confidence that every moment on the operator side would have been a moment to use it.
What it would have changed is time. Hours, days, weeks of it. Whether you're an account manager, an onboarding specialist, or a head of VIP pulling together reporting and insights, the time spent manually piecing information together is enormous. VIP Intelligence would have eliminated that.
But beyond time, it would have meant fewer misallocated resources, fewer costly mistakes, and the ability to put focus exactly where it mattered most, without delay.
Q8: A question for both of you. What is the single biggest misconception operators tend to hold about VIP management today, and where do you see the most room for the discipline to grow?
Viktoriia: The biggest misconception is that segmentation and personalisation are the same thing. They're not. Segmentation groups players by rules. True personalisation means a one-to-one experience shaped by actual behaviour. Most operators are still working with rule-based logic that hasn't fundamentally changed in years.
Gali: On the VIP side, it's that bigger numbers equal bigger success. What operators often end up celebrating are false positives or unsustainable practices that erode the programme over time. The room for growth is in discipline, by being more targeted and sustainable. That's exactly what VIP Intelligence is built for.
Q9: Viktoriia, personalisation is one of the most talked about topics in iGaming right now. Where is the industry on its maturity curve, and what does the next 18 to 24 months of evolution look like in your view?
Viktoriia: Most operators are still at the segmentation stage, grouping players by behaviour and sending the same experience to each group. That's a starting point, not personalisation.
The next 18 to 24 months will be defining. The largest operators are already industrialising it, building data science teams at scale, raising the bar for everyone. And there's a generational pressure coming: Gen Z will become a major player demographic within the decade, and they grew up with TikTok and Spotify. They expect relevance by default.
The window to build a real edge is closing. Operators who treat personalisation as a strategic priority today will be in a fundamentally different position when it becomes the standard.
Q10: Gali, you mentioned that technology should enhance the human factor in VIP management rather than replace it. Can you give a tangible example of how that balance plays out in practice, where the VIP manager remains central and the technology amplifies what they can do?
Gali: An account manager today splits their attention across multiple reports, dashboards, and data sources, all before the relationship work even begins.
VIP Intelligence centralises the cognitive ability of the account manager. The technology interprets the data and guides them on where to focus, so when they sit down with a player, they're fully present. The conversation is led by a human. The relationship is built by a human. Technology handles what would otherwise pull them away from that.
In VIP management, the engagement itself can never be a machine's job, and it shouldn't be.
Q11: Viktoriia, The Playa is built around the operator's perspective. What does "operator-centric" actually look like inside the company day to day, in how you build, prioritise and decide what to invest in?
Viktoriia: It means we don't see ourselves as a magic pill that an operator plugs in and walks away from. We're a tool for their team, and the results follow when both sides are genuinely invested.
In practice, every engagement starts with a discovery phase, understanding the operator's goals, their data, their product specifics. The models are trained on their data and tuned to their player base, so personalisation feels like a natural part of their product, not an external add-on. We support the full A/B testing process, stay close to the results, and the operator stays in the driver's seat throughout. That's what operator-centric looks like in practice, not a principle on a slide, but how we actually work.
Q12: Gali, beyond VIP Intelligence specifically, what other parts of the operator experience do you see being transformed by the kind of technology and expertise The Playa is bringing together?
Gali: The areas I see as most transformative are early detection and churn prevention, complementary to VIP Intelligence, but each standing on its own.
Early detection is about finding value before it's obvious, identifying a high-potential player at the point of first engagement and nurturing that relationship strategically from the start. Churn prevention ties into the same behavioural analytics. Understanding why a player's engagement is shifting, and acting before they've left, is where retention stops being reactive and starts being intelligent.
Together, these three components paint the full picture of the player. Each works standalone, but together they cover the entire lifecycle.
Q13: A question for both of you. VIP management is often described as both art and science. Where does each side genuinely belong, and how does VIP Intelligence give operators more of both?
Viktoriia: The science is what gives the art room to breathe. Understanding player behaviour, spotting signals early, knowing what's likely to happen next, when that foundation is solid, VIP teams can focus on what technology genuinely can't replicate: building the relationship, reading the situation, responding to nuance. That's where the real value sits.
Gali: In practice, most VIP programmes today are more process and KPI than either art or science. What VIP Intelligence gives operators is a way to move beyond that, so teams aren't just tracking what happened, but understanding why, and knowing what to do next. That's what turns process into something more meaningful, and raw data into a genuine strategic direction.
Q14: Viktoriia, what does this partnership with Gali unlock for The Playa's roadmap that wasn't possible before, and what should clients expect to see from the team over the next 12 months?
Viktoriia: What Gali's involvement brings is the assurance that VIP Intelligence is being shaped by someone who has genuinely lived what VIP teams face. That changes how we prioritise, what we build first, and how we distinguish what operators actually need from what just sounds good on paper.
Across the broader suite, the focus stays the same: build what teams actually use. The best tool is the one that gets used. And the direction is clear: personalisation should be a standard expectation in iGaming, not a differentiator. Everything we're building over the next 12 months is working toward that.
Q15: Gali, a final one. What would you say to a VIP team or VIP director reading this who is curious about VIP Intelligence but has not yet seen it in action?
Gali: In short, what are you waiting for?
What we've built hasn't existed before in any VIP programme. No operator in the world has applied VIP intelligence with this level of depth, this level of thoughtfulness, and this combination of technology and real-world expertise.
It's something you have to see to understand the value. Because once you do, it truly transforms the way VIP programmes think, act, and see what they do, day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month.
So reach out, see it, and then decide.
What emerges from the conversation between Gali and Viktoriia is a clear conviction that the iGaming industry has arrived at a tipping point on personalisation. The largest operators are industrialising data science capabilities at speed. A generation of players raised on TikTok and Spotify recommendations is approaching the age where they will represent a meaningful share of gambling spend. And the gap between operators that have built genuine personalisation infrastructure and those still relying on rule-based segmentation is widening month by month.
VIP Intelligence is The Playa's bet that the discipline most resistant to technological transformation, the human relationship work at the heart of every VIP programme, can be amplified rather than replaced by the right tools. The combination of Viktoriia's product perspective and Gali's operator-side experience is designed to ensure that what gets built is what VIP teams will actually use, rather than what sounds compelling in a sales presentation.
For operators weighing where to invest over the next 12 to 18 months, the underlying message from both is consistent: personalisation is moving from competitive edge to baseline expectation, and the time to build a durable position is now rather than later. Whether the answer for any individual operator is VIP Intelligence specifically or a broader rethink of how they approach their most valuable players, the strategic urgency is no longer in doubt.
