Page 72 - Public Gaming International September/October 2017

The lottery industry has heard a lot about it’s almost insignificant. Most importantly
API – this thing called ‘API’ in recent months. in-lane sales really come into their own when
there are rollovers, when the occasional play-
NASPL has an initiative to develop an indus-
Three try standard API with the aim of creating ers participate and new players feel engaged
some uniformity in lotteries using different by a large jackpot. The convenience of the
system vendors. But what does this all mean? purchase leads to new players and regular
And why should you care?
players buying extra lines on impulse. Some
Powerful what it stands for (Application Programming regular players, adding the lottery ticket to
This article could be about what an API is, of those new impulse buyers then become
Interface) and what it does. But this has been their groceries each time they shop.
Letters addressed in previous articles over the last key component to this all being possible. But
This is all managed by an API, which is the
year.
So instead we’ll tell you how Abacus have it is only part of the solution. A lottery who
used APIs in Europe, bringing important uses the NASPL standard API could just tell
incremental sales to a lottery, and doing so their system vendor to publish it and give that
in a way that is convenient for both the player API to a retailer and say: “build to that”. They
and the large retail organisations who sell the could do that to every retailer they desire,
tickets. with a separate project to connect each
All you really need to know about an API retailer and each retailer could develop to
is that it’s a set of instructions that tells one that API for each individual State Lottery. It
system how to communicate with another. sounds easy but it is much more complicated
They are used everywhere on the internet. and in reading this it may instil an image of a
On Facebook, when you share a video from plate of spaghetti. If it doesn’t it means you’re
YouTube and it plays the video in Facebook not reading it properly.
- that’s all done using an API. So how do we get over this complexity?
So what did Abacus do? Put simply we Abacus could remove that image of a plate of
enabled lotteries in Europe (such as The spaghetti from your mind. Abacus connects
Netherlands National Lottery - Nederlandse once to the lottery system and then manages
Loterij) to sell tickets directly from the the onward connection to each retailer using
Simon Butler retailer’s till, in-lane, using all the existing the NASPL API. Similarly looking from the
hardware including their PoS devices and retailer’s perspective Abacus connects to
Chief Executive Officer printers. The retailer doesn’t need a terminal, them once and manages the connections
of ABACUS Solutions the player doesn’t need to queue separately to back to the various state lotteries. Think of
International Group buy a ticket at the information desk and the it like your telephone at home, you have one
lottery reaches 100% of customers in that land line that comes in, that connects to an
store, instead of the 5-10% of customers who exchange and routes your calls to or from
typically visit a dedicated lottery terminal at anywhere. Abacus acts like that exchange,
the kiosk. connecting your lottery system to any point
And the result is that players love it. They of sale, whether that’s an in-lane till, a self-
can add a ticket to their purchases at the checkout till, an ecommerce platform, or
till as part of their normal shopping expe- anything else that processes a sale. But unlike
rience and the transaction is quick and a telephone exchange the lottery approves in
convenient. Retailers sell more tickets and advance who they can talk to, so it’s a closed
reduce the queue at the kiosk allowing them network and most important it is highly
to give customers a better shopping experi- secure.
ence. The process is designed to fit with the Let’s look at a very practical example,
customer’s existing behaviour as well as the again in Holland. Nederlandse Loterij had
retailer’s existing processes. The lottery sells signed an agreement with one of the largest
more tickets appealing to a new and younger supermarket groups in the Netherlands called
consumer and it is able to quickly expand Jumbo, to begin selling lottery tickets. Jumbo
points of purchase in a cost-effective manner. has almost 600 stores, with around 5,700
There’s no new hardware to deploy in store points of sale. The plan was to go straight
so no additional costs for maintenance. And for an in-lane solution because of the simplic-
they are reaching new players. ity it offered to what would be a complex
We are always asked about cannibalisation, rollout under the traditional approach. There
and the answer is always that it’s very low. It was a great PR story available too - the lottery
would be wrong to think there isn’t any, but under their Lotto brand and Jumbo were joint

72 // PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL // SEPTEMBER /OCTOBER 2017