A significant step in the US iLottery Market
Great news from Pollard about their Kansas state iLottery win to being in early 2025. The removes what was a very significant potential barrier for Pollard's participating in the US iLottery market. One of my primary concerns that came from the Michigan State Lottery award was Pollard's exclusion from the process because of their lack of an existing installed systems in a US jurisdiction for 12 months.
The Kansas state lottery assures that Pollard will be considered for, and can win, iLottery contracts in the future. This removes a MAJOR source of concern I had.
I have been search to see if the Kansas State Lottery published their processes findings like Michigan did. So far, I haven't been able to find it on the internet. It is important to me to know if this was won in a competitive RFP process or if this was a relationship win? I note that Pollard was already a digital supplier to the Kansas Lottery ( https://www.pollardbanknote.com/2016/12/15/pollard-banknote-awarded-players-loyalty-program-contract-by-the-kansas-lottery/ ). It would make sense that this relationship would extend into iLottery.
As I was searching, I see that there have been several changes to the Kansas state lottery in the last few years. While I am not 100% sure, I don't believe they had iLottery sales in the state before.
Ideally, I would like to see that Pollard won in an open and competitive process with many other vendors bidding. For me, this scenario, will provide the greatest comfort regardings Pollard's future in the US iLottery market. If they were able to win in a broad and open RFP process provides considerable confidence in their scale and maturity of their offerings.
I was also interested to see how mature Pollard's technology offering was being "fully cloud-native, modular, and API-first solution". This is a very current technology infrastructure approach and was encouraging. If Pollard will be competiting against more legacy based iLottery platforms, this puts them in a solid competitive position.
Regardless, the reaction of the stock reflects the continued rebuilding of confidence in Pollard's US iLottery prospects. I suspect that this will also address some of the short thesis and lead to more covering. The spike in volume is hopefully a short conceeding their position.
Overall, this is a very positive step for Pollard. I am happy to see them competing back in the US iLottery market.