31 PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL • MARCH/APRIL 2024 Since Covid and the significant growth in the digital space, the priority for lotteries is to know their customers and provide appropriate content that competes with the aggressive commercial operators and retains the core of responsible gaming. International customers also realize that retail remains important, and they need to strike the delicate balance of building their digital sales while maintaining their strong retail sales, which they are accomplishing with innovative omnichannel offerings. What opportunities do you see in the field today? Jay Gendron: From a global and holistic viewpoint, I see the opportunity to accelerate growth and technology innovation via advances like the cloud. Other highly regulated private and public entities — as well as government services — have migrated to the cloud to enhance security, improve scalability when demand requires it, and ensure that they always have the latest and greatest software updates available. Lotteries also need to be prepared and positioned to do the same. We’re taking a multi-phased approach: Where cloud makes sense, we’re moving those applications to the cloud right now. For instance, wherever we anticipate a dynamic demand, where we don’t control the volume of the activity that will occur, that’s a priority for cloud. If you think about the retail network, for instance, the number of retailer touchpoints is fixed. That’s a lower priority for coming onto the cloud than, say, a player-facing website. On a jackpot night, suddenly a large volume of players wants to check their numbers to see if they won. Accordingly, our approach is that all internetfacing applications will be the first wave to migrate to the cloud — and, in that respect, IGT is cloud-ready now. IGT’s Remote Game Server (RGS) for eInstant content — our fastest growing cloud product — is live in the cloud for our U.S. customers in Georgia, Kentucky, and Rhode Island, and internationally in Belgium, Italy, Lithuania, Norway, and Poland. With regard to iLottery, we have already migrated to the cloud all our eInstants content and digital draw game management. Our digital-lottery platform has already been deployed with Switzerland’s Loterie Romande and Poland’s Totalizator Sportowy. In the next wave to the cloud we migrated IGT’s “wizards” — Learning Wizard, Retailer Wizard, Sales Wizard, and Performance Wizard, IGT’s data and analytics platform— and AnyWhere, our API gateway. Having completed this work, we are now moving to migrating the lottery central system and applications. It will be truly groundbreaking when we get our core software operations in the cloud. We’re not there yet, but we are moving toward that horizon. As in other industries, lotteries are highly concerned about cybersecurity and want to protect against hackers gaining access to their systems. How does IGT approach security? Jay Gendron: When a cybersecurity attack happens to one lottery, others are rightly concerned. Cybersecurity is something we take very seriously. We monitor closely what happens in our industry, and especially with our customers. Any attack has the potential for similar impact on our operations. As a result, we monitor published security incidents, the root causes if they are made known, and intelligence we can gather from the dark web regarding that or related attacks. Using that information, we can ensure that the controls we have in place, whether technology or process, will successfully mitigate any potential for that event to occur for us. In general, information security controls are put in place to minimize the effect of any successful attack. Understanding that no company can prevent an attack, especially given the ever-evolving threat landscape, IGT places a great emphasis on early detection, alerting, and response. This positions the company to act with speed to contain and mitigate any potential adverse impact, should an attack occur. Layered security with automation is key to this strategy, and having the people in place to use that telemetry effectively is of paramount importance to the company. What’s your point of view on growth in the instants category, particularly in the U.S.? Jay Gendron: The industry has seen unprecedented growth particularly with instants and multistate games in recent years, even during Covid, when people not only continued to play, but lottery also attracted new players and player demographics. The importance of the digital channel also came into focus as a frontline for attracting and communicating with players, even for lotteries that can’t offer sales in that channel. The resulting record-setting growth has reset the bar higher – and, as often happens, the industry’s success also presents a challenge: continued sustainable growth. I think many lotteries still have opportunity to diversify their price point mix — by this, I don’t necessarily mean increase their price points, but optimize the mix. For lotteries that offer iLottery, there’s a chance to cross-promote and offer omnichannel content and games across retail and digital channels to continue to expand and diversify the player base. Some lotteries still have opportunities to expand distribution – whether through selfservice or by engaging with those corporate chain retailers who are increasingly innovating within the lottery category. Walmart is a prime example – IGT started working with Walmart more than a decade ago with one pilot in Florida, and that partnership and relationship has not only grown, but has seen Walmart bring its own point of view to the category – in how they use data to automate different aspects of the business to improve execution, reduce labor hours, and improve overall performance. We’re proud to have been a catalyst, working with that team in its efforts to advance the industry in collaboration with U.S. lottery partners. We recognize that staying at the forefront is possible because we’re able to work with forward-looking customers with whom we can innovate. We continue to develop and introduce new ways to advance in-lane sales, and we are engaged in multiple pilots with retailers in Texas, which we think have great potential for adoption by others. We also maintain our commitment to and involvement in advancing the NASPL API, and as that technology progresses we have complementary solutions that can enhance and improve the experience for players and retailers, such as our LotteryLink in-lane solution, which we previewed at the most recent NASPL conference. LotteryLink enables retailers to sell lottery games on their point-of-sale device without the need for programming. Do you see similar opportunities on the traditional draw-based game side? Jay Gendron: We’re excited about the Mega Millions game change to $5 in April 2025, as it will have an embedded multiplier feature and higher jackpots. We’ve seen this strategy work very well with in-state Lotto games in Colorado, Florida, Indiana, and
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