Jim Ryan is a familiar face in the iGaming industry and also an influencer, having worked in the marketplace since 2001 in C-level positions. Ryan is currently serving as the CEO of Pala Interactive, a gaming technology provider with a focus on US regulated real money iGaming.  Pala Interactive is the first tribal entity to receive a real money iGaming licence in the state of New Jersey and the company has big plans for California’s market once it opens up.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Ryan, one of my favorite executives in the iGaming space, to chat about Pala Interactive’s performance in New Jersey, his view on bad actor and tainted asset issues, how PokerStars’ imminent New Jersey license will impact his business, the state of regulation in California and the his opinion on the threat of Sheldon Adelson and RAWA.

Becky Liggero: Lets start with New Jersey.  A lot of people are disappointed in the performance of the New Jersey market so far- from your perspective, how are things going with Pala Interactive since you’ve entered the market in New Jersey?

Jim Ryan: From our perspective its been all good.  But we approached New Jersey, I think, with a very different viewpoint than others.  If you take a look at the facts, we entered the market a year late.  We entered the market without a known brand in the state of New Jersey, we’ve also entered that market without a database.  In one respect, one could look at this as us being disadvantaged.   In another respect, we actually see this as a great opportunity for us.

We went into New Jersey with three very specific objectives:

First, being a new enterprise, we wanted to expose ourselves to a regulatory process.  So having the company, its management team and its product go through that process, being vetted, positioning us not only for New Jersey but for other regulated US markets as they open up, fit perfectly with our strategy, which by the way, is to operate in US regulated, real money gaming environments.

The second reason why we thought New Jersey was well placed for us was that we had built a brand new technology platform, probably the only platform out there that was built specifically to operate in the US regulated market. Actually we built much of the platform with the New Jersey regulations in hand.  But its one thing to run that platform in a lab and it’s a whole other thing to expose it to the marketplace.  And we’ve done that for the last three months and learned an awful lot of things about the good, the bad and the ugly with our platform and we’re actually this week about to do our first major release which is going to optimize the product significantly, from the player journey perspective, from a conversion perspective.  We’re adding 28 new games to the platform this week which will take us well above 120 games, I think one of the largest in the marketplace.