German precision: How ZEAL Network became the country's ilottery leader

The harsh reality facing any entrepreneur launching their own business is that most startups fail. When it comes to ZEAL Network, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in July, it is not lost on co-founder Jens Schumann that most firms formed around a similar time – 1999 – probably no longer exist. Though he tells EGR there was an element of luck involved in its early survival due to the business gaining the trust of web-savvy customers open to the novel idea of playing the lottery online. Success was duly earned – and sustained – across a quarter of a century.

In the past few years, the operator behind LOTTO24 and Tipp24 has continued to evolve under the leadership of CEO Helmut Becker since September 2015, with the launch of two charity lotteries, freiheit+ in 2020 and Deutsche Traumhausverlosung in 2024. The year prior saw the release of virtual slots and instant win games. ZEAL boasts more than 200 online games in its portfolio.

These additions to the product suite led to a strong first nine months of 2024, with revenue up 40.6% year on year (YoY) to €121m and a 17% YoY spike in billings to €743m, directly correlating to a 17% YoY rise in the average number of monthly active users to more than 1.3 million. Lottery revenue jumped 35.5% to €107.6m and igaming revenue soared 461% YoY to a relatively modest €6.8m. EBITDA was also up 51% to just shy of €35m.

However, it hasn’t always been plain sailing, with the pair admitting there have been mistakes made along the way. But how the company has overcome these setbacks is what counts. When ZEAL moved its headquarters from London to Hamburg in 2019, the decision was also made to switch business model from a bet-on lottery operator to a lottery brokerage.

ZEAL eyes plenty of runway for growth, too, especially when Becker says online ­penetration for lotteries in Germany is 25%, compared to over 40% in the UK.

EGR: Jens, what are your highlights since you co-founded the company 25 years ago?

Jens Schumann (JS): Well, where to begin? I’m honoured that I was able to co-found a company that has managed to get to 25 years. We’re talking about the first wave of the so-called new economy, and not many companies that were founded during that period still exist. At the start of ZEAL, there were so many obstacles and challenges we had to overcome, and I have to admit a good chunk was, of course, luck.

From the very first moment, we were able to acquire really good people and create a great team spirit. From the very beginning, we had to fight through a market environment that was not very friendly. For example, when we started – we’re talking about the years 1999 to 2000 – not everybody was used to the internet, so you had to change the behaviour of customers.

We always said, most importantly, the fundamentals have to work, and the customer must have a positive experience with us. For example, a customer of Amazon back then bought a book and received the book – it just worked. On our website, they had to buy a virtual lottery ticket for the first time ever. They had to trust that the ticket they bought from us would actually provide them with the money if they won the jackpot. There was zero tolerance for error. We had to build trust – trust in our company and our service. Those were the fundamental things we had to overcome at the start.

EGR: Is there anything you wish you had done differently?

JS: Personally, I made plenty of mistakes. As a company, we did a lot of stuff wrong, and I think it’s always important how you handle that.

Transparency has made us able to have a good team and a good relationship with the team. We have always been honest. I ­remember when we made a bad decision around developing new system software, we said to do it this way and the team said to do it another way. We ended up doing it the management way and it was wrong. So, we stepped up in front of the whole team and gave out
150 T-shirts to each staff member that said, ‘I was right’ and the three people in management had T-shirts saying, ‘I was wrong’.

This is how you handle stuff. You always make mistakes and throughout the whole journey I probably made more mistakes than I got things right. But we always had people around us who helped us to correct them.

Helmut Becker (HB): I would say that is still a very strong part of our ­culture – that making mistakes is a part of the recipe for success. You can learn a lot from making mistakes, right? So, making mistakes and even being proud of the learnings that you can generate from mistakes is still a very important part of our culture.

EGR: Helmut, you’ve been at ZEAL for more than a decade. What are the biggest changes you’ve witnessed, not just for you but across the entire lottery industry?

HB: I joined ZEAL as a non-executive member of the supervisory board. That was 13 years ago and, therefore, my decision to join the executive board of ZEAL was probably the best-informed career decision I have ever made.

I knew a lot about the company, about the industry, and I joined because I saw tremendous growth opportunity for ZEAL going forward. Nine years ago, I became the CEO of ZEAL. This is the longest time I’ve ever been with a company. But it doesn’t feel like it. There were so many changes and there is still plenty of room for growth for ZEAL. I’m very excited about the opportunities ahead.

We have reinvented ourselves every four to five years, so it doesn’t feel like the same company that we used to be. We’ve changed business model from lottery betting to lottery brokerage. We’ve relocated headquarters from London to Germany. We’ve taken over LOTTO24 and we are in the middle of reinventing ourselves again right now.

We are successfully investing in the growth of our core brokerage business, while building new businesses that are driving additional growth for ZEAL.

EGR: Can you share additional insight behind the new products and businesses that ZEAL is building?

HB: Our core business is lottery brokerage, where we are selling the state lottery and charity lottery products in Germany. That’s a very successful and profitable business. We are by far the online market leader. And there is still huge room for growth because the online penetration for lotteries in Germany is at 25%, compared to more than 40% in the UK, over 50% in Sweden and 60% in Finland.

If you compare this to other digital products like music, travel or banking, you’re looking at even higher online penetration. However, we have, over the last few years, built a very versatile technology platform that we can use to build new products and new businesses.

We’ve acquired a huge base of more than one million monthly active customers that we can leverage for any new product or business that we launch, and we’ve developed an agile organisation. We’ve set up small, dedicated teams for each of the new businesses we are building. One of the new ones we are focusing on right now are virtual slots and instant win games.

All around the world, these games are traditionally part of the portfolio of ­lotteries, so we’ve added them to our mix. We also launched two charity lotteries that we built ourselves. One is called ­freiheit+, which is an annuity lottery where you can win €5,000 per month for 20 years. The other one is called Deutsche Traumhausverlosung – a dream house raffle, where customers can win real houses. It’s the first of its kind in Germany.

Both of those charity lotteries are very successful. Freiheit+ started off as an add-on product on our LOTTO24 and Tipp24 websites, but it has now gone direct to consumer with its own website. The same applies to the dream house raffle, which was very successful from the start as a standalone brand and direct-to-consumer offer. Both lotteries address a slightly different target audience and different user need. This is strategically very important to us. We’re expanding our market by building these businesses.

EGR: Monthly active users for the first nine months of 2024 increased 17% YoY. From your experience, what is key to acquiring lottery players?

JS: To a certain degree, the trick is the product itself because lottery is quite sticky. If you’re selling clothes online, a customer comes to you to buy something but you don’t know whether they will come back next week, next year or never at all. You have to push hard to keep them as a customer. If you are a regular lottery player, you tend to play the lottery once or twice a week – almost automatically. This is a big product advantage we have.

In the beginning, the most important objective was to stay online at times when high jackpots take place because that’s when you acquire the most customers and make the most revenue. It sounds very simple, but you need to have a very good tech platform that performs under very high traffic.

Imagine you are a customer; you want to participate in the biggest jackpot ever and your ticket does not get through. Back in the old days, the traffic overwhelmed a lot of competitors. And to be fair, us too once or twice. But our service was reliable and that was the big advantage for us. It’s about permanently optimising the website, product and platform to be the best deal in town for the customer. It’s not a secret, it’s hard work.

HB: What Jens described is still very relevant today. Plus, the benefits of an online business versus an offline business, which still drives customers to us. Online, you can play 24/7 from the comfort of your own home. You never lose a ticket and never miss a win. I think that’s still valid, and it still works today.

We are, besides being a lottery company, an e-commerce company at heart. This perspective helps us improve the customer experience and be very customer centric. More recently, we have added products, features and services that are unique in our market and address different target groups and their needs. For example, a feature that is currently beating our expectations is ‘play with friends’. It allows you to play online lottery together with a group of people, whether that’s colleagues, family or your football team. It’s something people do offline, and we enable it online.

We are adding these additional products and sometimes completely new business models, like new charity lotteries, to satisfy the needs of our customers. In some cases, they address customers who have never played the lottery before.

JS: Play with friends is a good example of a market evolving. We tested this product 20 years ago but it didn’t work because people were not ready to move that offline behaviour to the online world as it involved everybody being online and sharing something. You always have to retry and adapt to the given market. And this is the strength of ZEAL.

EGR: Last year you launched online games. How has that been received by players?

HB: Games is already a profitable business. It contributed €9m in revenue last year. But we’re not done yet. In fact, we’re still in the ramp-up phase.

The regulation and the boundary conditions we face are very strict. It’s all put in place by the regulator in Germany for player protection – so for good reasons. But some of the provisions are a bit over the top and also discriminating us as a lottery company against other gambling operators.

In addition, we still have to work on our product proposition. We’re continuously adding games to our portfolio, and we need to have a lot more games going forward than we have today. We are also adding features. So, we see very good early traction, very good unit economics and it’s already a sizeable, profitable business. Who can argue with that? But we are not close to being done with this. 

EGR: With ZEAL Network chairman Peter Steiner stepping down in 2025 after 12 years on the board, how much of an impact will that have?

JS: That’s a big loss. He’s been with the company for a very long time. He is very trusted by the executive board as well as the supervisory board. The good thing is we’ve just added another great person to our supervisory board – Carola Gräfin von Schmettow – and I have no doubt that we will, in May this year, appoint a great new chairman of our supervisory board to continue Peter’s legacy.

EGR: How is ZEAL implementing AI across the business?

HB: AI is here to stay and will become even more important going forward. We use AI, for example, for player protection. We have AI-driven tools in place that identify problematic behaviour and help us manage that. We also use AI in marketing and in our data science.

Jens described the business model earlier as very simple. It’s unit economics. You pay for a customer and then you try to make that customer stick. You can then earn money with that customer for many years and, in many cases, for decades. Sometimes I jokingly say our business model is ‘pay once and earn forever’. This is a daily optimisation job driven by data science. This can be AI-driven data science or more traditional data science. I don’t want to glorify the role of AI too much here.

It really is the data science behind optimising marketing efficiency and customer lifetime value that is driving our success.

EGR: What’s next for ZEAL?

HB: Further profitable growth. This is what we have done for 25 years, and we are not about to stop now. The amount of money we spent on marketing this year was by far, by every dimension, a record number. We added a big chunk of new customers to our player base, which will contribute to our numbers in 2025 and beyond.

Customers stick with us for decades. We added a big chunk of new active users to our customer base. This alone sets us up for a big step forward in growth and we won’t stop in 2025. Our new businesses have good traction. We also built a very strong team last year, which will enable us to shift gears and grow even faster.

At the same time, we will need to do some internal housekeeping in 2025 to make sure that all areas and functions can keep up with the speed.