Q&A: A Zeal for disruption

“The lottery industry has not had its Airbnb or Netflix moment, yet. We want to change that,” Zeal Network’s CEO, Helmut Becker, boldly states on the firm’s website.

To help the publicly listed company achieve this strategic goal, Zeal has adopted a flexible approach similar to that of an enterprising start-up, which makes it stand out from the crowd in terms of innovation and technology adoption.

The firm’s motto is to “create a better world of lottery” by being a dominant player in a number of areas ranging from lottery betting, charity lotteries, primary lottery operations to even lottery venture capital.

And that’s just one of the things that attracted Susan Standiford to the position at Zeal originally. “It’s not a single, siloed, blinders-on, focused world of what lottery is. Lottery is a lot of different things,” she explains.

For Standiford, joining Zeal was about driving a technical strategy that can have autonomous services through a service-based platform. “We want to create fast agile atmospheres where we can build new games, concepts and services,” she adds.

Her philosophy is to think about “technology as a weapon of good” so not just looking at the outcome or output of technology like a game or website but thinking about the components within technology as things that are leveragable and sellable.

Standiford met with EGR Technology to talk about how Zeal is attempting to disrupt the lottery space, its hybrid infrastructure approach, and how Zeal Investments has helped it to elevate new innovations and technologies in the online lottery sector.

EGR Technology sits down with Zeal Network’s COO Susan Standiford to discuss how the online lottery space has evolved in recent years and why its technology and products are helping it to differentiate and disrupt the sector

EGR Technology: What are the main goals for Zeal in terms of your technology strategy and roadmap?

Susan Standiford (SS): We’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years within our individual business units structuring our technology teams, platforms and services so we can build things, test them and learn from them.

Our Lottovate platform has been structured all around agility – a single platform built on world-class micro services and a service-orientated strategy. That allows us to have any number of different types of games, such as draw based and instant win, which can actually be put forward on the same platform.

In our other business units it’s a similar style focus. How can I get more games and touchpoints out to consumers faster? We definitely subscribe to the fail-fast scenario. If they work great but if consumers don’t like it, how do we tweak it?

EGR Technology: How are you planning to disrupt the online lottery industry?

SS: We’re disrupting in the B2B space for instance through our approach to for-profit philanthropy. And in the consumer space, our technology platform enables us to move quickly and try out lots of different things.

In one of our business units for example, we are spending a lot of time on a variety of instant win games. They are all measurable, all very quickly and easily deployable in an agile way to adapt them to what consumers want.

EGR Technology: You’ve previously worked as VP of technology for Disney Online and Travelocity in the past, what kind of experience or skills did you bring with you to Zeal?

SS: At Travelocity it was ecommerce, so I learnt a lot about taking my offline retail world into a merchandising space. We did some of the first work in recommendation engines in travel and I was brought in to really revolutionise the data and data warehousing.

After that I went to Disney, which was amazing specifically because of gaming; so casual gaming, kids, online and massive multi-player games. Oddly enough it was all very relevant to my work now. It was also highly regulated but for a different reason. It’s about protecting kids.

EGR Technology: What are some of the challenges and opportunities of being a woman in technology in a male-dominated sector?

SS: I’m a nerd, raised by nerds. The chief nerd in my house was my mother who was studying for a PhD in math education and she taught physics. There was never a question of women in technology in my household. Because I grew up with a very strong female role model, I don’t find a lot of those challenges.

And that has given me a lot of confidence in my lifetime. But as I’ve got older it does occur to me and it bothers me. I want to spend more time encouraging women through mentorships for accelerators and incubators.

Standiford presenting at Google

EGR Technology: Can you tell us more about the back-end technology infrastructure at Zeal?

SS: We are 100% in-sourced. We have consultants but we don’t outsource any of our technology. It’s an interesting sector because it is so highly regulated. It’s an old, dusty, crusty industry and there’s a lot of old hardware, code and languages floating around.

So we’re trying to make sure we are responsive to the regulators, but we’re also trying to influence them. There’s a lot of people that still want to see physical boxes and blinking lights. It’s about progressing people’s thinking around virtualisation and the cloud. This industry, and probably the banking sector like a lot of highly regulated industries, still has that certainty and comfort with the physical hardware.

EGR Technology: Do you use the cloud for any of your data/platforms?

SS: We’re very modern in our virtualisation and in our approach to hybrid cloud. We’ve got a tremendous amount of flexibility that allows us to put secure things in highly secure spots and those things that don’t have to be as physically secure into a secure virtualised environment.

That lets us deploy our platforms elsewhere, and if we want to deploy halfway across the globe we can do that with a cloud-based solution and not have to find a new datacentre. We use cloud providers and our own private cloud, and have plenty of physical infrastructure. However, everything we do is virtualised. We use Kubernetes to containerise a lot of our services and it gives us a lot of flexibility in how we deploy.

We’ve got a number of physical boxes but we have essentially virtualised so we get the highest amount of utilisation and efficiency out of that. We also use Amazon Web Services (AWS) a lot for testing environments and for deployability around the things that don’t need the physical securing.

EGR Technology: How do you manage scalability?

SS: We use some standard techniques, making sure our sites are responsive. We do a lot of testing externally as we know the user experience is directly tied to how long it takes a page to load, for example. The micro services strategy allows us, if we use a cloud provider like AWS, to move those web services very specifically into a jurisdiction. We also make sure user data stays in that jurisdiction so we can plug and play around that.

Our virtualisation strategy is built from the bottom up and the services sit on virtual machines. They are meant to be able to scale by adding more virtual machines. If a service becomes over-subscribed, I’ll add another virtual machine. We can set up whole dockerised containers using Kubernetes and generate multiple versions of it. We’ve tried to allow for horizontal and vertical scalability at multiple levels.

EGR Technology: Can you offer an insight into Zeal’s agile way of working?

SS: We’re committed to agility with a small a. What’s the best way of working so we can actually accomplish the most? We’re very committed to autonomy and accountability in self-contained teams. There are lots of smaller teams dedicated to the services or products they have. We’ve got architectural boards versus a top-down approach and we try to set standards for people to work within and let them go crazy with what they want to do. We also have a product management driven culture with great technical and product teams working together and we’re also very data-orientated.

EGR Technology: What’s your tech set-up on the B2B side?

SS: We’re doing more and more with partners and have brought lots on this year. The platform strategy is a product and B2B strategy. One element where we’ve been really active is with our Lotto Network product. It’s a white label version of our betting on lotteries product. We handle all the background information and marketing, and partners get the benefit of that.

It’s really B2B2C. What we’re now doing more and more is thinking about what other services we can make available. So, hedging as a service is a real differentiator for us, and gives us the opportunity to take bets from other players who already offer a consumer experience but would like to add to their portfolio of products. So we’ll be a B2B player there too. On the Lottovate platform, there are a number of things we are doing as primary lottery operator which give us a wealth of experience, such as offering SaaS experience in our tech and product teams.

EGR Technology: What innovative product developments do you have planned?

SS: Our for-profit philanthropy platform as a service is a massive innovation and allows us to extend these primary lottery operations and ecommerce services out to charities worldwide. We just launched Norway’s first digital-only national lottery with Unicef and are soon launching in the Netherlands with a revolutionary national lottery product.

Another successful product innovation, from our associated company Tipp 24, is Danke Million in Germany where players are entered into a raffle to win €1m for a friend. It adds an element of socialisation. In other products, we’ve also added the ability to invite your friends via WhatsApp so ways of incorporating newer technologies and social elements. It’s all about making a better consumer experience.

EGR Technology: Can you tell us more about Zeal Investments’ work with innovative start-ups like the Free Postcode Lottery?

SS: We’ve got a group Zeal Investments, which was set up as a VC style fund, run by our corporate development director, James Oakes. I sit on the investment committee along with our CEO Helmut and several members of our Supervisory Board. In 2016, we put £1m into the Free Postcode Lottery and, in 2017, a substantial amount of money into Omaze, which is a US-based charity raffle.  Zeal Investments started off looking externally which has brought a lot of interesting innovation and makes sure we don’t get caught up in our own world. We’ve also extended that to how we incubate ideas from within.

EGR Technology: Has Zeal been experimenting with technologies such as VR, AR, AI and machine learning? What potential do you see for these in the online lottery space?

SS: We are very data-orientated and it’s a very powerful weapon for us. We’re looking at how we can get better at segmentation in our customer base so big data, AI and machine learning are an element of everything we do. The AR/VR side is also really interesting. We talk a lot about these in hackathons and pitchathons and have certainly played with the technology. We have Oculus headsets wandering around the offices but we haven’t found that killer app yet.

EGR Technology: How do you think the online lottery sector compares to other industries in terms of tech advancements?

SS: Our games have to be exciting, so it’s all about our products, and our technology and platforms will and do differentiate us. The products that people want require flexibility and a lucidity to be appealing. It’s a dusty and crusty industry.

I think lottery is still stuck in that mentality of going from offline to online. Lottery is a perfect place to be online but the disruption is not there. That’s why I’m excited about us disrupting. What’s going to be exciting is when a mobile experience is more than just an offline to online experience. Where it becomes really interesting is where an app provides real consumer value. It is ripe for disruption.

EGR Technology: Which other industry sectors do you follow in terms of tech movements?

SS: I think the cryptocurrency and blockchain world is very interesting. Blockchain in particular is a solution that’s waiting for the right kind of application. I stay close to ecommerce and also the software gaming industry as game mechanics, player loyalty and gamification are really critical to what we are trying to do. I also follow the banking industry on the fintech side because payments are changing all the time in terms of how they work and how people use them.

EGR Technology: What’s next on the horizon for Zeal in terms of technology investment and advancements?

SS: We are constantly incubating these ideas through Zeal Investments. I think there will be interesting things happening in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space. As a company, we are committed to an internationalisation strategy and we want to see more deregulation in this market because we think monopolies are causing a bad consumer experience. We’re looking at how we can work with regions and countries to help with the deregulation and offer better products.

Susan Standiford, Zeal COO