Allwyn interim CTO: National Lottery overhaul was “monstrous” in size
Brett Cross tells EGR new platform will allow for faster product innovation and says “good is not good enough” for the lottery
Allwyn interim chief technology officer Brett Cross has described the UK National Lottery tech overhaul that completed in January as a “monstrous” in scale.
Speaking to EGR, Cross was reflecting on the digital and retail switch which involved the migration of 11.8 million player accounts and new point-of-sale systems going live.
Over the weekend of 24 January this year, the National Lottery tech team completed the shift as part of Allwyn’s £400m investment into the brand.
Allwyn secured the fourth National Lottery Licence in 2022 before replacing Camelot in February 2024.
As Allwyn completed the tech shift, the National Lottery app remained unavailable early on Monday 26 January as there was a slight delay in setting the refreshed product live.
Looking back on the rollout, Cross said: “I was involved in quite a lot of the preparations for the cutovers.
“I’ve done four transitions myself before, but the thing in the UK was it was much more than just swapping out transactional retail digital systems.
“They pretty much set up a whole new business, moved into a new office, migrated from Google to Microsoft, new CRM, new ERP, new team.”
On the slight delays as part of the launch, the New Zealander added: “They did all the load testing and everything beforehand and all the checks.
“They spent months and months and months exhaustively testing the platform but, when you go live, there’s always going to be variables you can’t test for.
“The team were able to get back up pretty quickly. I think the team have done over 100 releases since going live, and so the system is in a really good place. Now they’re able to innovate and launch their product.”
Cross, who has held the CTO role at Allwyn on an interim basis since February, also serves as CTO at Allwyn Lottery Solutions.
He previously spent more than eight years with Lotto New Zealand and had a near-two-year stint as tech chief at the Irish National Lottery.
Looking ahead to the immediate launch plans for The National Lottery, Cross pointed to the revamped Lotto game and Powerball going live for UK customers as highlights.
He said: “It’s a crazy amount of change that’s going on this year; you had the Lotto game change a couple of weeks ago, you’ve got Powerball in a month, which I think is going to be really interesting.
“I know the teams here have got lots of other stuff planned. A transition of that size is monstrous. The thing with the lottery, too, is good is not good enough. With the lottery, everything has to be perfect, and trust is so important.
“If a customer goes to a site and sees something funny, or a payment doesn’t go through, as soon as that trust is eroded, then they’re likely to churn the player.
“It was a huge undertaking. I think if we had our time again, we probably would have maybe phased things a little, but the team did a really good job.”