SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
In partnering with a raft of lottery organisations, EveryMatrix has entered a different world to the more commercially-oriented betting and casino landscape from which it emerged. But it transpires that lotteries too are now operating under different circumstances.
Frank Cecchini, the firm’s Head of Lottery Sales, observed in an interview with SBC Media that lotteries ‘have been forced to look at what they’re doing online’, due to the COVID-19 pandemic forcing a wave of digitization.
“Lottery is a game that happens over an extended period of time and younger players tend to want things to happen very quickly,” he said. “If they’re going to attract these players, they need to digitise.”
Despite retail venues across Europe and further afield reopening after the closures of 2020-2022, the forces of digitalisation are clearly changing the face of global lotteries, but operators also face other challenges.
Notably, firms are now meeting heightened competition from commercial operators. And, according to Cecchini, lottery actors can actually learn much from their privately-owned rivals.
He continued: “There is a far greater range of content in the commercial world. The EverMatrix platform has 21,000 games from 150 different providers.
“Not all of that content will be appropriate for lotteries, but some of it is. Players want that content, they want to see new stuff.”
Moving to the ‘different set of rules’ of the lottery operator, which Cecchini noted can be ‘very hot on responsible gaming’ due to governmental/ministerial connections’, EveryMatrix has been able to leverage its experience in the commercial space.
“We know what we’re good at. We’re good at content payments, the supplier management side of things with responsible gaming. But CRM is not our game, so we make it easier for third parties to connect to our system.
“It doesn’t take six months and a hugely expensive project to, for example, connect up to move into our system so the lottery can do some excellent player segmentation.
“That is a key difference in the openness and the flexibility of the system. If they want to be able to do that, then they need to move to a platform that is more flexible, and has modules that can be plugged in or plugged out and replaced by other modules.”
Looking ahead to the remainder of 2023, Cecchini remained confident in EveryMatrix’s ability to both stay connected to and deepen its links to the lottery sector, despite the difficulties the highly-regulated space presents.
