SBC News SBC Digital Summit: Ludovico Calvi leads off Lottery Day track

SBC Digital Summit: Ludovico Calvi leads off Lottery Day track

Day three of the SBC Digital Summit sees industry leaders discuss how the lottery sector has adapted to the host of COVID-19 caused challenges and what can be expected from the industry as a whole when the virus eventually dissipates. 

Delivering the opening day-three keynote at the SBC Digital Summit, Ludovico Calvi, President of the Global Lottery Monitoring System (GLMS), focused on the hurdles presented by the health crisis and the actions taken by lotteries during these unprecedented times.

“We are a non profit sports integrity organisation,” he said. “We value the corporations with both public and private stakeholders and pride ourselves on running education and integrity prevention programmes. We feel strongly about raising a culture of social responsibility and we interact often with regulators. 

“We provide monitoring intelligence services so we cover suspicious betting patterns and cover all possible markets. But we also focus on education building. We have a forward looking code of conduct based on the Macolin Convention and we use our network to share best practice with partners and members. We also provide information on suspicious betting patterns and match fixing cases.” 

Titled ‘Lotteries and the need for Cooperation’, Calvi’s keynote touched on GLMS’ actions throughout the COVID-19 period: “During this outbreak, we have been close to all members and we are trying to inspire actions during the crisis which would be effective,” he said. 

“We’ve focussed on employees and the safety of people as we can’t forget that we need people. Providing reassurances and defining effective communications with employees has been another key element at the moment. There has been a lot of confusion with the virus, so clear plans, transparency and communication is what was and is needed.

“Another important pillar is continuity and guaranteeing that we can continue reviewing processes and continue delivering as we should so we’ve tried to redeploy resources from bricks and mortar operations to digital ones.” 

The 28-year industry veteran, also discussed the effective responses to the crisis that has been implemented by lotteries and gaming organisations, including the essential actions put in place to safeguard the care and safety of employees. He further talked about business continuity and how the gaming industry had to review organisational processes to quickly adapt existing processes and re-allocate available resources to meet new challenges. 

“Companies have been in need of reviewing costs,” he added. “If we talk about sports betting operators there has been zero sports which creates an issue regarding profits and losses. 

“Significant cost measures have had to be put in place and we’ve seen furloughs, salary cuts and shift reductions which have all been put in place to preserve cash flow and profitability in order to guarantee the survival of entities. 

“Moreover, the fiscal and financial aid of governments and assessments of eligibility levels have been key to create the opportunities and financial buffers to continue operating and to set up recovery plans.”

Concluding his keynote, the GLMS President offered his opinions on how the industry might proceed in a post-COVID scenario and discussed the opportunities provided by SBC’s Digital Summit. 

“In the post recovery planning what we see is that people will be back in the centre – human resources and competencies are key. This is important. We need to engage our human resources and ensure that merit and competencies are valued as deserved because they can make the difference. 

“We also think that financially sound gaming organisations will prevail. They will overcome the crisis and can be in a position to take on short and medium term opportunities which will come post-Covid. 

“The market will also change which means evolving. We need to engineer the way we deliver our services and solutions, we need to be scalable and make sure that whoever is receiving our data/content appreciates the differences and delivery method innovations. 

“We also need to automate and review the processes as we’ve been doing through lockdown, in an efficient and automated way. This will create accuracy and using data to fuel this process is key. We are going to change the culture. We need to be more innovation based and change the company personality regarding risk taking and cross functional cooperation.

“In this moment of unparalleled crisis, events such as this innovative digital summit organized by our strategic partner, SBC, are a great opportunity to discuss very strategic issues affecting the betting and gaming industry with prominent industry leaders.”

The SBC Digital Summit runs from 27 April to 1 May 2020 and features seven conference tracks, a virtual exhibition and virtual networking lounges, attracting an estimated 10,000 delegates logging in from around the world.

There is still time to register for the event, with company discounts available: https://sbcevents.com/sbc-digital-summit/tickets/

SBC News SBC Digital Summit: Ludovico Calvi leads off Lottery Day track

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