26 PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2025 DRIVING PERFORMANCE ACROSS THE LOTTERY ECOSYSTEM Pat McHugh Chief Executive Officer, Scientific Games PGRI INTERVIEWS Paul Jason: Congrats on winning the Ohio Lottery systems award! What technology and services will Scientific Games be rolling out in Ohio? Pat McHugh: Thank you! We're very excited about this win. It keeps Scientific Games’ momentum going strong as the fastestgrowing lottery systems partner. The Ohio Lottery systems award speaks well to our strategy of combining games, technology, analytics and services to help drive performance for our customers. We see this as the strategy of winning for both lotteries and their players. We have already had great success in Ohio with the Lottery’s adoption of our Scientific Games Enhanced Partnership program in 2019. Like our other SGEP customers, the Ohio Lottery has enjoyed significant growth in its Scratch-Off products since we launched the program. Now, we will extend our partnership philosophy to the system side of the Lottery’s business to power growth across the overall portfolio. We're providing our Momentum ecosystem in Ohio, which combines our core Aegis central gaming system, WAVE retail point-of-sale terminals, PlayCentral suite of self-service machines and all our applications associated with POS. We’ll integrate additional tools and value-added components as needed. Our Momentum ecosystem also includes the ongoing support of Scientific Games’ expert teams dedicated to driving lottery performance and results. The core of the central gaming system is transaction processing, and we manage that well. We think of Momentum as a technology ecosystem that enables all varieties of applications, technology upgrades, third-party solutions, data analytics tools and other business intelligence systems to manage things like digital advertising and CRM as needed. How is the lottery ecosystem different from the central server system? McHugh: We view the ecosystem as the entire player experience combined with the many applications and tools lotteries use to manage their business. The central gaming system is a critical core component managing the games and transactions, but the ecosystem extends beyond that. Our goal is to integrate all game categories, enterprise applications, analytics, services and customer-facing functionality to deliver a seamless omnichannel player experience. Our new head of Digital, Matt Lynch, comes from outside the industry and immediately observed that players probably don’t think about iLottery any differently from lottery. It’s not Walmart and iWalmart. It’s just Walmart. It’s all just lottery. The players want a user experience that makes it easy to play lottery games wherever and whenever they want. Scientific Games is creating a player-facing ecosystem that does exactly that. A crucial part of this is an ecosystem that allows lotteries to scale up as demand increases and add new technologies that become available. Why should lotteries that do not sell online allocate resources to getting players to register and engage with loyalty programs? McHugh: Like any major consumer brand, digital has become the key component to engaging with the modern consumer. That’s true not just for companies that sell products online. Any consumerfacing company, regardless of its business model – online, retail, or service-based like airlines or coffee shops – can benefit significantly from a well-structured loyalty program. It’s also true for lotteries building loyalty programs and players clubs to increase sales at retail. Everyone knows digital engagement is key to retaining customers for long-term success. However, the ROI timeline is not just long-term. Successful lotteries all around the world are applying digital strategies and tools to increase sales in the short term, too. iLottery is about creating an omnichannel experience for players to enjoy the fullness of lottery at multiple touchpoints … playing at retail, redeeming their secondchance draws online, seeing other games they might like to try while browsing online, etc. The omnichannel player experience represents a huge opportunity for lotteries to engage their players on multiple levels. This wider variety of messaging opportunities and promotional tools results in
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