41 PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL • SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2024 What is forefront on your radar right now? D. Beebe: We have three major IT platforms: one for the casino, one for lottery and sports betting, and one for digital. Bringing those three platforms together so that our player can conveniently move across them is one of the major initiatives. There are around five and a half million people in BC. Three and a half million played lottery within the last year. That connection with the vast majority of the adult population can help us drive growth in other game categories like casino gambling and sports betting, but only if we provide a convenient, seamless, pathway to migrate from one space to the others. The same underlying technologies that enable a friction-free player journey can also provide us with a single 360 degree view of the player which enhances our ability to provide the right information and the right promotional offers to the right players at the right time. I don’t think we have used the word “omnichannel” yet, but that is what you’re describing. D. Beebe: We want to make sure everything is as easy and convenient as possible for the player, whatever games they want to play, wherever and whenever they want to play. For example, a casino player is required to show their I.D. at the door to be admitted. They know that’s to prevent players who have self-excluded. But it also results in a friction-point where the player is asked to show an I.D. What we can do is build on our modular retail lottery system so that, for example, a player who registers for lottery digital prize payouts can use that same registered ID when entering a casino – reducing that friction, sharpening our ability to reflect the preferences of our players and making them feel valued. It’s great that you see a short-term ROI for the investment you are making, because everyone knows long-term sustainability depends on modernizing like this. D. Beebe: It becomes not only a way of thinking, but also doing, and I am encouraged to see our other technology partners embracing this philosophy as well. BCLC is a social purpose organization. Everything we do is to generate win-wins for the greater social good. “Sustainability” is not limited to revenue for good causes. We think it means to maximize overall benefit to society. This includes our commitment to ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance), shrinking our carbon footprint and stretching to find new ways to be the best corporate citizen. Cloud technology: What role does it play and why it is important? D. Beebe: BCLC has its main data center in our head office in Kamloops and then we have a backup data center just outside of Kamloops. That’s rows of server stacks that need maintenance, lots of energy, and operational attention. Moving the data storage and management to the cloud enables us to shrink our physical technology and server footprint, reducing the amount of energy, security, controls, maintenance and staff required to manage that physical footprint. It enables us to focus our human resources on higher value-added activities like innovation, improving data-analytics process, optimizing the player experience, and inventing better games. Of course, we now need to manage cloud-based infrastructure, but that is a leaner, more specialized task. Physical data centers require backups, so you have to build two systems in case one goes down. In a cloud-based system, these are all virtual so if you lose the primary, it automatically fails-over with no loss of service to the secondary. Lastly, we do not need to spend time and money updating the hardware as it is all part of the cloud service. It may be a little too soon to ask, but has player registration increased since the cutover to the new systems? D. Beebe: Player registration is a good indicator of player engagement and forms the basis for future revenue growth. We are seeing quite an increase in our registered play. Some of it is due to improvements to the registration process, some of it is just the increased utilization of mobile phones to process digital selection slips. Of course, we are always developing new features and benefits to add value to the mobile playing experience. BCLC players have increased their mobile lottery play and that does not seem to be tapering off. Pre-pandemic, our digital lottery sales were around 5% of total sales. After the pandemic, we are up to around 15% and almost 900,000 downloads of our lottery mobile app. It is the single biggest ticket checking device in the entire province. It would important also to note that our retail business has grown right alongside of digital sales growth and is as vital a part of our business as ever. You referred to registrations as a good indicator of player engagement and the basis for long-term growth. D. Beebe: It is really about the experience. And that experience includes the land-based retailer. Our digital lottery platform and lottery mobile app need to be an enabler of the retail experience – think of it as a retail companion app. The partnerships with our retailers are critical to the success of our business. Digital is a great convenience, but it is not always the destination. Our players tell us that there is nothing like buying a lottery ticket and enjoying the dream. We need to preserve those moments because that is the heart and soul of our product. In the end, our goal is to build out a playing field, a constellation of options for how to engage with BCLC that includes convenient access to all the benefits that we hope will thrill the player, drive ongoing engagement, and inspire everyone to dream. n Technological Transformation and the Engagement of the Modern Player — continued from page 18
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTg4MTM=