In this interview with CalvinAyre.com’s Rebecca Liggero, NeoLotto CEO Marcus Geiss discusses the latest innovation of lotteries and what the Dutch lottery market can learn from the German model.
There’s a lot of things the Dutch lottery market can learn from Germany.
Marcus Geiss, CEO of NeoLotto, said the German lottery market right now has made breakthroughs when it comes to regulations.
“In Germany, fortunately, I have to say it’s allowed now to sell the lotteries as a private lottery reseller, and we positioned ourselves, NeoLotto, as operator with focus on mobile devices,” Geiss told CalvinAyre.com. “It’s not anymore only about offline, the shops and the Internet. We have now built a technology which allows you to play wherever you are [by] having your lottery shop on your mobile phone.”
In the Netherlands, there are currently about 12 lotteries operating, which might seem quite a lot compared to its European neighbors. But industry players said the Dutch market is actually lagging behind UK and the Scandinavian countries where lottery is growing.
The problem with the Dutch market, according to Geiss, was that the operators are trying to do too many things at once.
“You heard from the Danish colleagues that once they have implemented all the other games—sports betting, casino and so on—the core product, the lottery decline because they were too much distracted by the other products,” he explained.
Geiss believes the answer is not integrating or separating the products—it’s focusing on just the core product.
“My advice to the lottery operators is to really focus on the lottery product. Don’t start to enter into competition with all the sports books, poker and casino providers because it’s really a difficult business,” he explained. “There is already a lot of competition and I think that’s not what the lottery operators are good at. So they really should offer lotteries because they have really very, very unique product because they offer life-changing jackpots and that’s something that nobody else can offer.”
Geiss said there are a lot of areas that lottery operators need to improve on, including optimizing sales channels and improving user experience.
“In Germany, we’ve got a lot of things wrong when it comes to regulation, so we know about all the discussions about sports betting and so on. The only good thing that we have in Germany is that it’s allowed for private resellers to sell the government-run lotteries. For example, in NeoLotto, we can run our own lottery shop in the Internet or the mobile phone, selling the German product and I think that’s good for competition and that’s how I think the Dutch should do as well,” he noted. “They should give to private operators the chance to become an online interactive reseller, so then you have more point of sales, more revenue, more competition, [and] more innovation.”
