Catena Media case: scaling support for the iGaming leader

Innowise supported the execution of Catena Media’s transformation into a product-led organization by helping launch a new product, refine a core one, streamline CTA banner creation and strengthen analytics and security frameworks.

Industry iGaming affiliate

Employees 150+

Region Malta

Services Back-end development, front-end development, business intelligence, SecOps, DevOps, QA, UX/UI design

Client since 2023

Client overview

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Catena Media is a globally recognized iGaming affiliate marketing veteran. They help online betting and casino operators attract high-quality leads through a network of reputable, content-rich websites. As a player-facing affiliate business, their revenue model is primarily based on clicks and lead generation. Currently, the company is pursuing a strategic transformation to achieve faster and more sustainable growth.

Challenge

In 2024, Catena embarked on a strategic transformation to transition to a product-led organizational structure. The initiative focused on restructuring the organization around its strongest core brands while overhauling the technology infrastructure with a new platform to enable agile brand and data management.

Catena also sought comprehensive data collection processes for strategic decision-making and new revenue streams, including sub-affiliation, CRM and paid media.

Given the strategic nature of transformations, Catena Media needed a trusted technology partner — one that could combine consulting expertise with robust engineering capabilities to make every move count. These moves included supporting Catena with:

Developing a sub-affiliation platform — engineering a new product connecting operators with affiliates, enabling real-time campaign performance tracking and enterprise-grade security.
Redesigning the key product — improving usability, functionality, and visual appeal of the casino guide website and ensuring a seamless relaunch without service interruptions.
Developing a creative generation tool — implementing a tool for creating and managing customizable marketing banners from a single dashboard.
Reinforcing analytics framework — refining analytics and reporting to enable consistent, comprehensive, and data-driven decision-making across all products and initiatives.
Implementing ongoing vulnerability detection — integrating security tools that catch vulnerabilities during development to ensure safe and continuous product updates.

Solutions we delivered

Throughout the collaboration, Innowise specialists integrated with Catena’s development teams. Starting with a website redesign, our involvement quickly snowballed, making us a core external development partner.

Mrktplays — next-gen sub-affiliation platform

In cooperation with Catena’s team, Innowise frontend, backend, UX/UI, and DevOps experts helped develop a multi-user sub-affiliation platform from the ground up, bringing their B2B initiative to life. MRKTPLAYS is a centralized solution for operators to connect the right affiliates through Catena’s mediation and manage campaign performance seamlessly.

Starting with the platform’s robust architecture, we advanced through wireframes and mockups shaping user experience and proceeded with implementation, validating high responsiveness and scalability. This way, the centralized affiliate platform enables:

Complete affiliate management cycle. Submissions, deals, campaigns, affiliate links, commission, and traffic source data tracking are integrated into user-friendly dashboards, providing real-time visibility and advanced filtering.
Three user roles. Publishers and iGaming operators can securely register, place orders, communicate, and track campaigns, while administrators build and facilitate business relationships.
Secure and traceable authorization. Access is secured with AWS Cognito managing registrations and logins with MFA, secure tokens and triggers that record authentication events.
Reporting system. Integrated with Power BI, daily reports on performance and commissions are displayed as visual charts, and can be filtered by date, operator, publisher, and campaign.

Beyond feature development, we guaranteed the platform maintains high reliability and performance by ensuring:

Stability during peak loads. The backend was offloaded through synchronized processing in Amazon SQS and Amazon SNS, ensuring reliable message delivery and steady performance under heavy demand.
Advanced observability. Metrics collection was set up for continuous monitoring across all application layers, triggering instant alerts and enabling faster incident response.
Smooth UX. Clear workflows were built for intuitive navigation, while advanced APIs ensure high responsiveness, stability, and user convenience.
Faster delivery. Leveraging Infrastructure as code (IaC) practices and managed databases sped up the development and deployment, reducing manual work, minimizing incidents, and lowering TCO.

An MVP was launched within six months of project initiation, already engaging its first users. Currently, Innowise is implementing online chat features and working with Catena’s Product and Engineering teams to help expand the roadmap for continuous product evolution.

Nexus — affiliate promo banner builder

By joining the project at the prototyping stage, Innowise’s front-end team helped the client refine and complete a custom CTA banner creation app — turning a manual, design-heavy process into a self-service, automated product tool. With Innowise’s extensive support, particularly in extending core functionality and adding new entities, the app gained:

Advanced customization options. Client teams can now fine-tune banner layouts and visuals for each partner in just a few clicks.
Built-in affiliate links. Enables automatic generation and storing unique tracking links for every client.
Campaign management. Grouping banners is available by periods, holding targeting data, timelines, and associated banners.
Fast loading of relevant data. Optimized caching enables seamless interaction with dynamic, up-to-date data.

In parallel, we helped the client prepare for a transition to a microservice-based backend to make the architecture future-proof. As part of this process, we implemented:

Express to Next.js migration, isolating business logic to support modular growth and easier scaling.
A new public API, separating the external interaction layer from the core system to keep the app stable and fully operable during upgrades.

Following Innowise’s involvement, the tool was successfully completed, and its overall performance significantly improved. We continue to support the client by expanding functionality, enhancing performance, and ensuring long-term maintainability.

PlayUSA: key lead generation engine, revamped

As the client began focusing on maximizing product value, we helped enhance their key website through a complete redesign, new features, and page-level implementations. Acting as WordPress solution architects, Innowise’s full-stack team ensured that the new design, content, CMS, and server logic operated cohesively. We coordinated structures, workflows, and rebuilds for templates, components, and data models, while integrating and customizing multiple plugins.

With our support, the website gained:

Accurate front-end styling. By integrating SCSS, we ensured that colors, spacing, and typography were implemented precisely as designed.
Customized layout. Through ACF, we added content-editor customization, enabling the creation of structured, tailored materials via additional fields and custom content types.
Quick data table setup. With TablePress under the hood, users can now create and embed data tables directly into pages without writing any code.
High performance. Implementing LiteSpeed Cache brought efficient caching, faster response times, and improved page-load speed.
SEO-friendliness. We integrated Yoast SEO into new templates, ensuring full control of metadata, schema markup, and URL structures so that the redesign did not affect search visibility.

After the redesign launch, Innowise continues to support the client, maintaining and enhancing the website while developing additional products.

Advanced reporting framework

As a part of the client’s Data & Analytics unit, our BI experts helped transform data analytics processes to keep reports ever-fresh and comprehensive across all client products. Our experts implemented new metrics, consolidated data sources, and enhanced report representation — streamlining assessment of partners, campaigns, commissions, and traffic sources.

Key enhancements that underpinned this transformation included:

Raw data transformation framework. The data architecture, SQL views and procedures were developed to combine, clean and standardize raw data from new sources and produce analytics-ready datasets.
Interactive data input. Power Apps integration activated user-friendly data entry and correction with instant synchronization to Power BI reports, improving collaboration and report accuracy.
Dynamic data exploration. Power BI dashboards now provide dynamic filtering, slicing, drill-down navigation, interactive visualization, and more, enabling cross-department usage and report examination at any level of detail.
Real-time alerts and update triggers. Key metrics are now monitored continuously, enabling the team to quickly identify and respond to anomalies in real time.
Enhanced BI infrastructure. New data sources were integrated via Power Query and SQL connectors while report performance was optimized, driving a faster, more stable, and scalable BI environment.

For less than a year, our two-engineer BI unit has created over ten report models, now actively used across product, financial, marketing, partnership, and top management client teams. The reporting service has become a single source of verified data, helping the client take key strategic decisions across the organization.

The Innowise team continues to enhance data value and supports the Catena team in effectively using analytics reports while fostering data awareness across the client’s organization.

Scale-ready security framework

Working with the client’s team, the Innowise SecOps expert ensured the client’s websites remain secure through every update by implementing two layers of verification — before deployment and during runtime. After researching security pain points, regulatory requirements, and auditing the existing environment, we evaluated and tested several SAST (static) and DAST (dynamic) application security tools to identify the best fit.

As a result, Innowise coordinated the introduction of Snyk and Invicti tools for ten key products and integrated them into the client’s CI/CD pipelines to automate security checks at the development stage. Additionally, we delivered a unified vulnerability manager that automatically creates tickets for addressing vulnerabilities after detection.

This made the client’s websites ready for frequent updates, maintaining full security throughout code changes.

Technologies used

Backend

Node.js, NestJS, Express, WordPress, PHP

SecOps

Snyk, Invicti, Python, AWS Lambda, GitHub Actions, Sumo Logic

Data management

MySQL, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Prisma, Redis

DevOps & infrastructure

AWS Cognito, AWS S3, AWS E2C, AWS ECS, WAS ECR, Datadog, Sentry, Cloudflare KV, Cloudflare Workers, AWS RDS, AWS KMS, AWS Lambda, AWS SQS/SNS, AWS Cloudwatch, Docker, Docker Compose, Hetzner

BI & analytics

Power BI, Power Query, DAX Studio, Tabular Editor, Power Automate, Power Apps, Azure Synapse, SQL, Airtable

Frontend

Next.js, React, Mantine React Table, Ky, React Query, RxJS, JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, CSS, SCSS

Design

Figma

Team

Full-Stack Engineers (Node.js/ React)

Front-End React Engineers

Back-End Node.js Engineers

Full-Stack PHP Engineers

DevOps Engineer

SecOps Engineer

BI Engineers

UX/UI Designer

Results

Project duration

July 2023 — Present

With solid development support, Catena Media established product-oriented processes that led to clear, measurable outcomes:

Revenue diversified. The new sub-affiliation model introduced new revenue streams, reducing dependence on B2C lead traffic.
+23% traffic growth on the core website. Engagement started climbing three months after the redesign.
50% less time spent on banner creation. The banner builder tool significantly accelerated creative production for client teams.
Faster decision-making. Complete and transparent insights are now available for each product, campaign, and initiative with data-driven reporting.
Partner network optimized. Using advanced analytics, the company's focus was realigned toward partnerships with strong mutual benefits.
Security checks streamlined. Vulnerability management shifted from manual checks to continuous scanning and alerting, helping verify product security faster.

A new productized service, total observability, and streamlined operations enabled the client to stabilize revenue growth and strengthen its position as a reputable, trusted sub-affiliation partner. Innowise remains a committed technology partner, helping the client implement their strategic vision without compromise.

Transform reliably with Innowise

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