Simon Butler, Chief Executive Officer, Abacus Solutions International Group

Consumers will be even more digitally disposed, and credit debit will become essential and handling cash will be seen as undesirable by some.  The less business can be conducted without touching people or product the better.  Abacus can put the lottery into the retailer’s ePOS and make the lottery available everywhere the retailer chooses to go to market.  So, an integration via our gateway is essential if lotteries want to sell across all retail channels.

The draw games were struggling before and we hear they are having a hard time reaching escape velocity.  However, instants are soaring, so the lottery business is coming through the crisis better than most industries. Abacus is well positioned to help grow instants across all retail channels and we are looking at solutions with both Scientific Games and Pollard in this regard.

We think the younger demographic will “snap back” rather quickly.  Each decade of age may indeed respond more slowly and only time will tell on travel.  There has been real demand destruction and it is hard to predict how long to get back to zero level.

We are meeting with retailers continually.  They want more sales, less shrink, and easier accounting and settlement.  These are the solutions that Abacus as part of our overall lottery service that we can supply with our integration into the ePOS.

We are working hard to attract some of the biggest retailers in the nation that have not really embraced lottery in the past specifically because of high levels of shrink, accounting and settlement issues. At the same time, open up more lanes of distribution in the grocery category that is not in lane such as self-checkout and selfscan.  Next will be new channels like restaurants and coffee shops etc.  We are at the very beginning of a massive expansion into new distribution points with an emphasis on growing digital.

The biggest obstacle that Abacus faces is very real challenge of aligning all of the competing interests and getting launched in each CGS.  The stars may be aligned, but the retailer, CGS, Lottery and Abacus need to be in geo-synchronous orbit, and that is hard.