The technology challenges every iGaming CTO is facing

The industry has scaled rapidly, creating premium events attracting tens of thousands of delegates, speakers and other stakeholders, but is it catering to an iGaming technology audience?

Most conferences follow the same format. Walk into industry events, and you will see panels on market expansion, keynotes on regulation and networking sessions designed for business development teams.

Engineers attending talks that were not built for them leave without a single idea they can use.

As ICE prepares to launch the Digital and FinTech Transformation Hall in 2027, it is partnering with SOFTSWISS on the Tech Race Summit. Ahead of that event, Sergey Kastukevich, chief technology officer at SOFTSWISS (pictured left), explains why the industry needs to create space for its own technical conversations and outlines what a conference built for engineers actually looks like.

Below are the five reasons the conversation needs to happen.

1. iGaming lacks a dedicated space for technology discussions

“As an engineer, I want to take ideas from an event. I want new perspectives, practical lessons and a better understanding of where technology is heading”

iGaming events focus on business. That makes sense because the industry depends on market expansion and commercial relationships. All of it matters, but none of it is aimed at the people building the platforms.

The engineering community in iGaming still lacks a dedicated space to meet and work through shared technical problems. Architects want to discuss system design. Infrastructure teams want to compare scalability approaches. Developers want to learn what broke and how others fixed it.

Those conversations need a different format. While the industry has plenty of places to discuss growth, it has far fewer places to discuss how the technology behind that growth actually works.

The gap leads to a situation where problems get solved in isolation. Because knowledge stays inside individual companies, the same mistakes get made across the industry, at different companies, in different years.

2. The industry has outgrown its technical conversations

“Too often, conferences become marketing exercises. Companies spend twenty minutes explaining how great their products are. It looks like a competition to attract clients, wrapped in the language of a conference”

Twenty years ago, iGaming borrowed heavily from other industries. Today, it is no longer a young industry in the process of establishing itself. Platforms now handle millions of users, process transactions in milliseconds and operate under regulatory frameworks that rival financial services in their complexity.

That level of maturity deserves a corresponding conversation. A dedicated space where technical leaders can present real case studies and discuss real failures.

3. The growing complexity of modern infrastructure

“When you stay inside your own industry, you tend to see only familiar solutions. When you start talking to people from other sectors, unexpected ideas appear”

From the outside, iGaming may look simple. A player places a bet or launches a game. Behind that interaction sits a highly sophisticated technology ecosystem.

Platforms need to support high transaction volumes, process payments in real time, manage responsible gambling controls, integrate hundreds of external services and comply with different regulatory frameworks simultaneously. The infrastructure behind these systems is genuinely interesting to engineers outside iGaming. Few industries have had to build infrastructure capable of handling a World Cup kick-off and a jackpot trigger simultaneously, with zero tolerance for downtime.

The reverse is equally true. The approaches that AWS, Oracle and Cloudflare use to manage high-load distributed systems, AI infrastructure and real-time data do not stay neatly inside those companies.

4. Fast-moving industries need technology that does not break

“AI is the new high-load – the way high-load architecture was the hot topic five years ago. Everyone had a talk about it. So now ignoring AI would be just as wrong”

Few industries move as quickly as technology. Few industries change as quickly as iGaming.

Engineering decisions that felt advanced two years ago are table stakes today. High-load architecture, real-time data processing, AI-driven development – each of these moved from experiment to operational necessity faster than most organisations anticipated.

In iGaming, the cost of falling behind is immediate. A platform that cannot handle traffic spikes loses revenue and players in real time. A development team that has not adapted to AI-assisted workflows loses speed to competitors that have. Keeping pace requires more than reading about what others are doing. It requires direct access to the people making those decisions and the experiences behind them.

5. Breaking out of the iGaming technology bubble

“Innovation often happens when different perspectives meet”

The instinct in any specialist industry is to look inward. iGaming engineers benchmark against other iGaming platforms, and architecture decisions are often validated by what competitors are doing. As a result, the reference pool stays too narrow. 

Innovation rarely happens in isolation. Some of the best ideas in technology come from outside your immediate field. They happen when engineers, architects, product leaders and founders share experiences and borrow ideas from one another. The stronger those conversations become, the stronger the industry becomes with them.

Want to join that conversation? Tech Race Summit 2026 takes place on 10 September in Warsaw. The programme includes 30+ speakers from AWS, Google, Oracle, Cloudflare and beyond. Tickets are available at the Tech Race Summit website.