Bede Gaming Canada Limited was selected by OLG to install a new player platform by early 2020.
“OLG’s mission is to give Ontarians access to the best entertainment wherever they are,” said Bede Gaming Managing Director Alex Butcher in an interview with La Fleur’s Magazine. “The OLG Lottery group wants to provide the players with that opportunity however they want to play. A significant amount of that traffic today comes from retail, but there are a lot of opportunities to cross-sell those customers into digital channels and to access the lottery products much more easily from their home and from their smartphone.”
For instance, mobile usage for some of Bede’s European customers represents 75% to 80% of their volume. Having access to a compelling digital channel will be important to the future of lottery. “It is critical to ensure that lotteries are appealing to a younger demographic. Having a first class experience on the mobile app is very important,” stated Butcher.
“Access to real-time data is one of the things that sets our product apart from our competition,” stated Butcher. “We have one of the leading real time solutions in the market. We are able to collect a lot of information about device usage and players as part of the journey—all of which the player agreed to in entering the system. We have a significant amount of data processing power available to OLG to segment those players and understand how they want to use those products. This capability is one of the key reasons that OLG accepted Bede. I should add that Bede’s vision is to be the safest place to play. We’ve recently gone through the process in Europe to ensure that our systems have quite detailed levels of consent gathering to ensure players are aware of their rights. All of that functionality was developed because of EU legislation. It will also be available for OLG as well.”
The initial Go Live of 2020 focuses on delivering a broader set of products on the digital channel.
“OLG’s stated strategy is to have the right digital platform at the heart of the operation. This will help enable that single customer view,” said Butcher. “We have an engine in our platform that will allow OLG to segment and respond to users’ actions in real time. It could be a call to action or it could be social media.”