12 PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL • MAY/JUNE 2024 Continued on page 41 of of consumers, play-styles, and demographic profiles. We launched several projects, some of them already being successfully implemented, for the digitalization of internal processes, and to be able to manage ourselves more efficiently. We now have nearly 1,000 of our own points of sales, spread all over the country. We also expanded our network of partners, going also towards the providers of self-service terminals. The products of the Romanian Lottery are now accessible in more than 38,000 points of sales. And now reaching to the essence of your question, it came time for us to identify the most time-efficient way of implementing the Online Selling Channel. Time was essential, as the pressure from the market was growing. So, from the comprehensive analyses we had already performed, three approaches emerged – one in which we could have launched a public tender to contract a software provider to develop an online platform; another one in which we develop in-house our own platform; and another one which involved partnerships with app owners that already had a big pool of clients, to integrate our products. We went forward to analyse the last two options because the first one was less time efficient to implement. Seeing the strong points and weak points of each project we concluded that the benefits of the projects can be overlapped, so we made the decision to give the green light to both of the projects. We would build our own app and also partner with already-existing app owners. In terms of business, going towards already established apps to integrate our games has proven to have some extremly strong points. We identified apps on the market which already had a large pool of clients, which allowed us to have a quick entry into the market – around 6 months. That enabled us to capitalize on the already existing app features, which enabled us to offer a comprehensive and competitive gaming experience. The possibility of selling lotto tickets through multiple channels gave us a huge boost and connected us with consumer groups which we may not have otherwise reached. We were able to create and implement additional promotions for the products and in less than one year we managed to exceed our target benchmark of 26% of our sales coming from the online channels exclusively. Additionally, we gathered data from the market through our app partners and we were able to work on developing our own in-house online selling platform, that we just launched in March. We see it as a new step towards digitization, transparency, and accessibility, which were our main objectives right from the beginning. It is a promise respected by our players and retailers alike, to be as close as possible to the Romanian consumer and to further strengthen the trust with which we have been invested by the players, in the tradition of over 117 years of history of the Romanian Lottery. What is an example of a 3rd party app partner? Ionuț Valeriu Andrei: AmParcat.ro is a parking payment solution that provides the ability to pay the parking fee on your smartphone. Through the AmParcat app, users are now able to purchase lotto tickets and participate in the draws organized by the Romanian Lottery. AmParcat has over 1 million users, a huge customer base that is now being presented with the option of playing the Romanian Lottery. Some lotteries may suffer from "paralysis from analysis" and the pressure to spend more and more time and money testing and researching in order to further reduce risk. You describe coming to a point where you had not eliminated risk, you were not sure what the outcome would be, but you met a threshold of confidence in the outcome, and had gamed out the war-room scenarios so that you had an action plan and contingency plans for the different ways that things might unfold. In hindsight, how do you look upon this approach now? Ionuț Valeriu Andrei: It is true, we had to dive in! Of course we had a strong analysis behind every step we took, but I chose to take decisions as a manager, not as a technician. Technicians tend to wait for a project to be 100% failproof in order to take it to GO LIVE. As a manager, I see the things quite a bit differently. Rather than wait twelve months for a project to be 100% failproof, I prefer to launch it after three months when it is at 98% and do another two months of live fine tuning. In the end you have the same project implemented in half the time. Testing and implementing the preliminary results of each stage put us in the position of being flexible and able to modify or even pivot based on the real-time feedback. Time is sensitive in a dynamic market like gaming and we decided to keep up the pace with our engines at maximum speed. But we did not go blindly ahead as we are constantly monitoring results and bringing new features, new opportunities, and new games on the table. We've observed healthy competition among partners who are driving increased sales, and we continuously assess how the diversity in user experiences benefits our strategic objectives. Did you say that part of your approach included plans for pivoting if you fell short of the target, or if some part of the plan did not perform as well? Like dropping either the in-house app or the third-party app partnerships if one out-performed the other by a big enough margin? Ionuț Valeriu Andrei: We are always analysing and adjusting, as mentioned before. Of course every approach has it`s own risks, and we are well prepared for multiple scenarios. The partnerships with the 3rd party app providers are going well and the results have been much higher than our initial expectations. Also, with our own platform we are looking towards building on the momentum and we want to gain as much visibility as possible. So that foundational aspect of our strategy is not likely to change. However, we are not looking solely at these steps and processes from a sales Online sales continued to increase at a breakneck pace to the point of exceeding 20% in a grand total of thirty weeks time. Last time we checked, they were at 26% of total sales.
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