In this digital age, lotteries increasingly rely on great technology to attract and retain players and drive revenue for their good causes. As competition for players’ attention and spending grows from iGaming and online sports betting, and as players’ expectations for online experiences evolve, lotteries are faced with tough decisions about investing in technology change and, more specifically, what to prioritize in an iLottery solution. Whether upgrading to a comprehensive iLottery platform from a modest digital infrastructure or replacing a legacy system altogether, investing in the right technology is necessary for lotteries as they seek to fulfill their strategies for growth.
For iLottery, most existing technology in the market is already at least 20 years old and therefore faces many challenges to meet the current and evolving needs of lotteries and their players, who expect the same experiences they have with leading e-commerce platforms. Legacy platforms struggle to deliver the modern player experiences, business agility, and innovation needed to excel in today’s competitive digital landscape. And since lottery contracts can be long–often ten years–starting with legacy solutions only increases the risk of technical debt and ultimately foregone revenue over time.
Enter Pollard Banknote. Starting in 2009 with our pioneering “Space Between” digital lottery portfolio, Pollard Banknote has established itself as a leading innovator in the digital space. Today, we continue to deliver a broad array of digital solutions to lotteries around the world, from best-in-class digital games, mobile apps, websites, and loyalty programs, to now a fully modernized, revolutionary turnkey iLottery solution with the most advanced gaming platform at its core.
Pollard Catalyst™ Gaming Platform: Transforming iLottery
Pollard Banknote has been a key player in iLottery since the inception of this channel in the United States. In 2021, we made a strategic decision to invest in our own end-to-end iLottery technology, beginning with the acquisition of an advanced iLottery platform that had been effectively serving established lotteries in Europe for many years. Leveraging our learnings from a decade of North American iLottery experience, Pollard Banknote advanced this technology for the U.S. market, culminating in the Pollard Catalyst™ Gaming Platform.
Catalyst is a fully cloud-native, modular, and API-first solution that is uniquely positioned to revolutionize the lottery gaming systems space by leapfrogging legacy alternatives. The platform’s modern design quickly and easily integrates with other solutions and enables cutting-edge features such as fully automatic scalability, even during high-demand jackpot runs. Catalyst is structured to accelerate roadmap development, testing, and implementation, and speed system modifications as needed by the lottery to achieve its strategies.
Catalyst provides all the essential elements for an exceptional player experience while minimizing the risks of technology and functional obsolescence as lotteries grow over time. Our robust Player Account Management system provides the functionality required for registration, age and identity verification, wallet transactions, and responsible gaming features. Geolocation services are provided through Pollard Banknote’s proprietary GeoLocs™ technology, one of the most mature and reliable geolocation compliance solutions available today.
Pollard iLottery Solution: Accelerating Growth
Our state-of-the-art iLottery Solution combines the cutting-edge technology of the Pollard Catalyst™ Gaming Platform with a suite of masterfully crafted games, sophisticated solutions that drive engagement and revenue across channels, and a portfolio of business and operational services that drive revenue growth for lotteries and their good causes. We offer all draw-based games, eInstant games from the Pollard Digital Games Studio and make it easy for lotteries to integrate additional third-party content. We don’t just pay lip service to the concept of content integration; we are fully committed to it, to the benefit of lotteries and their players. Our offering extends to include a suite of services, including marketing, draw operations, risk management, and player support led by a team of experts with unmatched U.S.-based experience operating iLottery programs.
Frictionless Player Experiences & Deep Engagement
Our focus is on creating holistic, intuitive, and frictionless player journeys and deep player engagement. Marketing support from our experienced team includes insightful, data-driven recommendations for player acquisition and retention. Our marketing engagement platform is powered by Bloomreach, a leader and visionary in the digital experience platform space, serving over 1400 global brands. The deep integration with Bloomreach allows lotteries to use real-time data to identify player actions in the moment to deliver highly personalized communications. Bloomreach allows lotteries to start building player profiles from first interactions—even before a player is registered—and continuously builds out the profile thereafter, as more player actions take place. It effectively manages the player experience and content throughout their lifecycle in a user-friendly and streamlined manner.
Omnichannel Centric Design
Our open architecture enables integrations with various systems and solutions currently deployed in retail to support a true omnichannel experience that drives growth across channels. Additionally, we are able to capture and report on all channels of player engagement to create a single, 360-degree player view. We also track all player interactions at retail through player cards and loyalty numbers, among other options, in a single unified platform. This combined view provides deeper player insight that, in turn, creates more engagement possibilities.
Safe and Secure
Cyber Security is quickly becoming an emerging area of importance in today’s world, especially in the online gambling industry. Our system has increased levels of security complexity to guard against bad actors. We employ a layered approach, and as such, it’s much easier to detect and respond to any anomalies in the system. Most iLottery platforms are designed as large monolithic applications or a few large services. Our fully microservices-based architecture consists of dozens of services and multiple utility services. Each draw-based game, for example, runs as its own contained service. Our layered security model wraps each service with an additional layer of protection that’s not typically found in lottery systems, with each service being secure on its own, in addition to a strong perimeter defense. Monitoring this type of system to detect any suspicious activity and for breaches is easier to do given its structure and identification of any concerns is equally made simpler. This is in addition to the fact that any potential breaches would be highly contained in one area of the system, thus also being able to be more easily resolved. The combination of our microservices-based architectural design with layered security and highly robust monitoring approach sets us apart in the industry and ensures a gold standard in systems security.
Responsible Gaming at the Core
While we have fully integrated the best responsible gaming practices from the National Council on Problem Gambling and the World Lottery Association Responsible Gaming Framework, Catalyst is designed to go above and beyond these standard practices. Using predictive modeling, our platform categorizes players into risk levels and generally enables the identification of potentially at-risk players. We then use behavioral-based segmentation, that is, real-time tracking of responsible gaming-related account changes, including the identification of concerning behavioral play patterns. The intent is to foster a healthy relationship with recreational players and provide relevant content to players that may be at risk, at the most relevant time.
Join the Revolution
Adopting a new iLottery platform or converting from a legacy system is a significant undertaking for a lottery that can be made successful with the right solution and the right partner who can reliably deliver it. Technology is constantly evolving, and lotteries need to start their journey as far along the technology road as possible to position themselves for success. The Pollard Catalyst™ Gaming Platform speeds integration, implementation, and modification over time to meet lottery requirements and evolving player expectations, which results in higher acquisition and retention and ultimately drives revenue for good causes. At Pollard Banknote, we have made the investment, built the team, and done the work to offer an iLottery solution that allows lotteries to achieve their goals now and as they grow.
