Lotto NZ apologizes for poor tech

Monday 17th of August 2020

Lotto NZ CEO Chris Lyman has apologized for some of the glitches in online services amidst a spike in gambling activity and said the company expects to have completely revamped its technology by 2024.

The company began a $25 million project in 2019 to upgrade the MyLotto website and app, which it expects to be completed in early 2021.

“To support the move to online play, and the big increase in the number of people playing online, Lotto NZ is making a substantial investment in the upgrade of MyLotto. The current website is ageing, and the upgrade is required to meet higher demand online,” said Lotto NZ Chief Executive Chris Lyman.

“While this work is underway we have been making interim improvements. However, regrettably there have been some issues on MyLotto. This has in turn resulted in some pretty poor customer experiences, and for that I sincerely apologise.”

The work to upgrade MyLotto will ensure the back-end processes are more robust, and able to deal with higher traffic on the site. Lotto NZ is also planning a full replacement of its gaming system in 2024.

“While we have had some issues with slow processing speeds, and poor customer experience, I can provide absolute assurance that the integrity of our games have not been impacted,” Lyman said.

Lotto NZ has seen a surge in online players since March, with the number of people playing online increasing by 33 percent.

“We have significantly more people buying tickets online now than ever before. Nearly 200,000 people have registered to play online since 25 March – to put this into perspective, this is the number of new online players we would expect over a two-year period, not four months.

“This week alone 32,000 people have registered to play online, with around half of those from the Auckland region.”

Prior to the lockdown in March, 25 percent of Lotto NZ’s sales were online and 75 percent were in-store.