Austrian gaming outfit Novomatic Group and Swedish online betting technology provider Kambi Sports Solutions are teaming up to help state-run lotteries diversify their product offering.
On Tuesday, Novomatic subsidiary Novomatic Lottery Solutions (NLS) and Kambi Group announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding to fuse Novomatic’s lottery platform with Kambi’s sports betting technology to provide a full-service, omni-channel gaming solution to government-regulated lotteries.
The dynamic duo will showcase their new service – which will operate under the co-branded ‘NLS Sports Betting – Powered by Kambi’ moniker – at next month’s World Lottery Summit in Singapore.
The omni-channel product will place particular emphasis on interactive gaming, an area that most state lotteries have yet to fully embrace but one they need to adopt if they wish to retain the interest of younger demographics who have shown less interest in traditional lottery products.
Kambi CEO Kristian Nylén said the partnership combined “two modern systems, deploying state-of-the-art technologies while exercising the inherent expertise of each.” NLS CEO Frank Cecchini logrolled right back, saying his company was right chuffed to have teamed with Kambi, “a like-minded partner in technology and an expert in sports betting operations.”
Kambi, the former B2B division of Nordic online betting operator Unibet, has been on an expansionist tear ever since it was spun off into a standalone entity in 2014. The company has inked a raft of new online gambling clients, including Rank Group, LeoVegas, Mr Green and R Franco just this year, leading to a threefold rise in profits in its Q2 report.
Interestingly, the Novomatic-Kambi tie-up comes the same week that GamblingCompliance scribe Sara Friedman reported that US state lottery officials had met with the American Gaming Association last month to discuss the AGA’s campaign to press Washington politicians to lift the federal prohibition on single-game sports betting outside Nevada.
Friedman quoted Charlie McIntyre, exec director of the New Hampshire Lottery and government relations committee chair of the North American Association of State & Provincial Lotteries (NASPL), saying NASPL members “wanted an open dialogue on sports betting because they understand that we have a vested interested in maintaining the good causes that we serve and lotteries that we run.”
