The lottery may be one of the more straightforward gambling offerings in the industry, but that doesn’t mean it runs into the same issues as sports betting or casino when it comes to taking its product into different cultural and regional markets.
Lottofy CEO Fernando Ortega has been involved with the online lottery since 2004, long before most other people were even thinking about selling tickets online. He spoke with SBC Americas about his career, where the online lottery is going, and adapting the online lottery product for the Latin American audience during November’s SBC Summit Latinoamérica.
Ortega started off by talking about what exactly sets the lottery apart from other types of gambling.
“The main thing that lotteries can do is what they have always done and that is to offer real-life change. That is why what we were saying, the prizes that are in the lottery cannot be seen in any other type of vertical. In other verticals, you can get an important prize. Let’s say you can buy a car. If you win a relevant and important prize in the lottery, what you can do is change your life completely and that of your entire family,” he stated. “In addition, the advantage of lotteries is that there doesn’t tend to be a problem of compulsive gambling, so let’s say that it is easier to market without the fear of generating certain compulsive gambling.”
Even though the broad scope of audience for the lottery sets it apart from other verticles, it runs into the same adjustments across markets.
“The main difference that we find with respect to, for example, Spain and the rest of Europe, where we started working, is the issue of security and trust,” Ortega explained. “It changes a lot because by default they are distrustful. But hey, both our support team and our marketing team try to get us as close as possible, so that they see that we are there, that we offer them a product that is close to them and with which they can rest easy, and gradually we overcome it.”
The same differing attitudes about security arose when Lottofy expanded into Latin America. Ortega denoted some of the things Lottofy has done to address those differences.
“The main obstacles are what we have mentioned about security because the user in general in Latin America is more distrustful. So you have to take it one step further. As for trust, explaining a little more that if they win a prize, they will receive it, that you are going to take care of managing everything, and that everything will be fine.”
On the back end, the differences across countries extend beyond communication about security. Payments, in particular, are something Ortega highlighted as very different in the LatAm market.
“In Latin America practically everything is a local and sometimes micro-local APM, which makes it much more difficult and you have to have many more providers or a provider that covers more things,” he said.
You can watch the full interview with Ortega here.
