Brandt Montour of Barclays initiated BetRivers parent Rush Street Interactive at overweight with a $24 target, noting the company’s unique gamification throughout its products and its opportunities in Latin America.
Montour noted how RSI punches well above its rate with a 10.4% online casino share, best for fourth in the country despite a low online sports betting share and a much smaller top-of-funnel than the top three in FanDuel, DraftKings and BetMGM. That share is due to its differentiated promo strategy, which gives bettors more ways to win beyond their bets or spins and makes the customer feel like they are winning more often than on other platforms, he added.
“That gamefication is what helps raise the value perception (winning more often) to RSI’s customer, which inevitably leads to that higher rate of game play and to us, likely the highest iGaming retention in the industry,” Montour said in Friday‘s note.
RSI’s stock was up around 4% at 1 pm Eastern Monday.
Will industry catch up to quality?
One of the noteworthy things about Rush Street’s ability to continuously grow share is that it has come while other operators are increasing their focus in the market and being more aggressive with promotions.
With its higher value perception for customers, BetRivers likely attracts the most pure slot players, which offer higher margins, Montour said. That slot play along with RSI’s promo rate around 19% compared to 25% for the industry means it collects more net revenue dollars per customer than its competitors, he added.
While other companies can try to copy what RSI is doing, Montour expects the company will always stay a step ahead.
“As seen in RSI’s history of promo offerings, the company is constantly researching, evaluating and looking for innovative and differentiated ways to gamefy its promotions to customers, and so for us, even if competitors were to replicate RSI’s existing promotions, the company will continue to find unique ways to uplift that gamfication experience to players,” Montour said.
BetRivers would benefit most from iGaming expansion
Online casino is only available to about 12% of the U.S. population compared to around 50% for sports betting.
If RSI maintains its 10% market share with a gaming revenue per adult around $384, each additional percentage point of the population that gains access to online casino would raise North American revenue by 7%, Montour estimates.
Online casino revenue accounted for 80% of North American revenue in fiscal 2026, the most of the major operators. BetMGM is next at around two-thirds, Penn at a 50%-50% split and DraftKings and FanDuel both around a third each.
Any share loss would likely be temporary and at the expense of other operators ramping up to potentially unprofitable promotion levels to pull online casino players from BetRivers, Montour said.
Latam growth ‘should accelerate’
Gaming revenue in its Latin America segment has grown quickly, with Mexico growing at a compound annual growth rate of 39% from 2018-2026 and Colombia growing 29% for the same period.
RSI began in Mexico in 2022 and while it holds just a low single digit share, the market is five to six times larger than Colombia, Montour explained. That means RSI can generate a similar contribution from Colombia despite not holding a large market share.
Montour forecasts RSI’s revenue from Mexico around $65 million, the same as the fourth year of operations in Colombia, which now accounts for $330 million to $340 million of revenue.
