NEW ZEALAND LOTTERIES Commission, known as Lotto NZ, operates as a Crown Entity under the Gambling Act 2003. Its retail network encompasses almost 1350 lottery outlets across New Zealand and employs more than 5000 people, making it the country’s single largest retail network.

Brett Cross, general manager – technology, says Lotto NZ’s topmost technology investments this year are around mobile, customer experience, open source and digital.

He says the technology team will relaunch the MyLotto website with responsive design. It is also working on native mobile apps that will include all functions available on the website such as wagering and account top-ups.

MyLotto, its digital channel, was launched in 2012, and continues to grow year on year. In its 2015 annual report, NZ Lotto reported total sales through this channel reached $75.5 million, up $1.6 million, or 2.1 per cent, on the previous year.

The report noted how use of mobile devices continues to grow rapidly and close to 40 per cent of all MyLotto sales now come through a mobile device.

Over a year ago, the ICT team developed a smartphone app that enables players to check tickets from their phone and establish instantly whether they have a winning ticket. This has proved to be very successful with usage continuing to grow throughout the year.

In the past year, the team increased the functionality of the app by introducing a second chance draw allowing players to enter their non-winning tickets into a draw for another prize.

Usage of the app continues to rise, up to one million times per month in the final quarter of the 2015 financial period.

Given that digital sales, and more specifically mobile, are only going to become more and more important to its success, Lotto New Zealand says it will continue to invest in this area of the business to meet the expectations of customers over the next four years.

The current backend of MyLotto is also being replaced with a new platform that will protect the integrity of the channel, reduce the cost of development and continue to strengthen its digital offerings.

The new platform will allow the team to move to mobile first design principles, with mobile increasingly being the first screen many consumers turn to.

From here, everything will be designed for a mobile device that, through responsive design, will scale to fit whichever device is being used to access the site. This will provide a feature-rich, consistent user experience across all devices, as well as increase internal efficiency for delivery of changes and ongoing operational tasks.