Intralot is ready for London’s ICE
The international providers of games, technological solutions and services for the industry recently signed 10-year contracts with Chile and Kenya and told Focus Gaming News’ correspondent all about their expectations at ICE.
Group Director Product Management & Planning, Nikos Papadoglou, chose Focus Gaming News to describe further experience the company will face during 2016. For starters, the international gathering in ExCel, London, next February 2 to 4 where Intralot will showcase its revolutionary and attractive new products.
It is less than a week for ICE to start, what do you expect from this show?
ICE is one of the largest gaming events worldwide and every year it attracts thousands of industry professionals seeking for the most innovative gaming solutions and new trends. Intralot has renewed its appointment for this year as well and will be present with an impressive booth, a “Pavilion”, showcasing its array of innovations and new customer centric solutions. At our booth N6-160 we will unveil our product strategy and our vision for the future. This year, Intralot will have a strong presence at the ICE Conferences as well with two keynote speakers, Antonios Markopoulos, Intralot’s, VP Business Development, Europe & Africa at “Modernizing lotteries: retail & digital” and myself speaking at “Cross platform & multi-channel gaming”, both addressing to leading global thinkers, entrepreneurs and regulators. We are absolutely confident that Intralot presence at ICE 2016 will be the most successful ever, captivating visitors with its iconic booth and best-of-breed, world class gaming products portfolio.
Will Intralot introduce new products during the show? In that case, which are the advantages for the casino and the player?
At Intralot we emphasise on developing products that provide players an even better entertainment experience across all distribution channels. Omni-channel is the industry’s buzz word but to us, it is a lot more than that. A fundamental priority is to offer players the opportunity to have the exact same experience whether they play from the comfort of their sofa through a mobile device or at a retail store. As this is the core value of our future propositions, we have created a product portfolio that secures both operational excellence and player satisfaction for lottery and gaming operators. All of our offered products are player-centric, addressing their needs as they have been identified and collected from our worldwide operations and customer insight researches, triggering innovation and exploiting emerging market trends. At ICE, we will launch some of our star products and concepts such as the Retail store of the future, a new and compelling Cinematic Betting experience that differentiates operator’s with premium and attractive content display as well as an entire new approach to interactive gaming. It is important to highlight that for the first time in our industry we will present a new vending machine intended for Sports Betting to widen the customer reach of Betting and out of the same time introduce impulse buy & quick pics, our new “Tap & Bet” product. We are really looking forward to unveil them before the eyes of ICE visitors.
Which are this year’s plans? Which markets are you focusing on?
With contracts in 57 jurisdictions, Intralot is continuously concentrating its efforts towards exploiting any business opportunities meeting its strategic plans. We are focusing on the B2B2C markets, and also on the emerging ones, such as African countries that offer interesting and unexplored opportunities. Finally, it is needless to say that we are also focusing our efforts in our existing customers/partners to further enhance their operational excellence through the use of our CRM platform and enhanced managed services.
How do you see the gaming industry today? Which are the challenges for this year for the worldwide industry?
The gaming industry is going through tremendous changes. The landscape is changing and Intralot is quickly adapting and is ready to face the challenges of the new era. Small start-up companies are increasing their market share while at the same time large mergers also take place. The biggest challenge though, will be to keep up with the changing customers, their needs, their habits and to make sure that we keep entertaining them as we have successfully done for the past 20 years. Millennials, a newly shaped target group of our interest, combined with the explosion of the rapid technology developments will shape the industry for the years to come. We at Intralot have accepted this challenge and we are constantly working towards continuing to deliver the best customer experience and innovation possible.
