Money Saving Lotto
New type of lotto for players to have fun gambling without the risk of losing even a dime
Overview
Gambling is one of the activities everyone probably has experienced in some stages of his/her life. Though elation, wealth and joyness are what people might be expecting from gambling, gambling also comes with the huge risk of having its participants lose all their gambled money and go into debt.
The gambling addiction situation in Thailand is already horrendous. Thailand is ranked 2nd in Asia in terms of how the country's population is addicted to gambling, especially the lottos. In 2021, more than 1.13 million Thai people have a total aggregated gambling debt of more than $500 million. This highlights how significant the gambling addiction in my country is, urging my team to choose the gambling addiction problem as our topic for the Financial Well-being Hackathon we were participating in.
After all the process to come up with our product idea, we ended up with the idea of a new type of lotto. The product was implemented on the basis of being partnered with a bank from Thailand which was an organiser of the hackathon.
Product Overview
What is our product?
We are a new section in the application of the partnered bank. We will organize a new lotto system which users can participate by making transactions with their account in the app. Once registered users make financial transactions with the partnered bank account, users will gain points. The more transactions being done, the more points the user will get. Once the user accumulates up to 100 points, the user will get one ticket of our lotto. Then, users will be able to have fun trying out their luck with our lotto.
The bank is now deploying a new financial product improved from our idea countrywide.
Why should the partnered bank support the product?
Since the bank we partnered with has 70% of users who receive their revenue through the bank withdraw their revenue to their bank account in other banks right after they receive the income, the bank has a problem of not having users’ data to adopt in providing financial products to its clients. Our product will attract users to have our partnered bank as their main bank. The bank will then have users' transaction data and eventually manage to earn more income from providing its users with additional lending or financial products.
Where is the lotto’s reward from?
After the banks adopt data in providing additional financial services to users such as loans, the bank will allocate some of the additional income gained to be the product’s reward. Therefore, we can be sure that our products will always be profitable or at least not making a deficit.
Customer Research
The research goals of this project is to understand-
(a) What are the needs and pain points of people who are addicted to gambling?
(b) What are gambling behaviours of people who are addicted to gambling?
In order to get initial insights and a deep understanding of the problem, our team has collected valuable data points and gained meaningful insights by interviewing 34 lotto addicted players along with implementing the secondary research findings.
Round 1: Secondary Research
The insights we gained from the research includes:
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The age range which is addicted to lotto the most is 40-49 years.
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Females are statistically more addicted to lotto than male.
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Peer pressure is among the most potent factors in deciding whether one will gamble.
Round 2: User Interview & Findings
Key insight findings:
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Users feel that saving money is boring since their saving principal is usually not that high and the interest rate is also very low. Therefore, saving money will provide them with very little return.
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Users feel that gambling is basically another kind of commonplace entertainment.
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Users feel that gambling is one of the few available channels for them to climb up the economic ladder and have a better quality of life regardless of how low the chances of winning are.
Key behaviour findings:
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85.3% need to be capable of choosing their own lotto number.
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100% prefer to have small rewards removed from lotto and have the prizes include more big rewards instead.
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41.2% usually buy 2 or less lotto tickets per month while 26.5% usually buy between 3-4 lotto tickets per month.
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67.6% prefer to buy from offline channel.
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35.3% will spend less into money wasting lotto after being provided with our product.
Personas & Customer Journey
Based on our interviews, we segmented our customers into two main groups:
- Low income middle-aged gamblers
- High income educated young gamblers
To form a deeper understanding of our users' goals, needs, experiences, and behaviours, we created 2 personas and a user journey map to study both customer segments.
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Feature Prioritization& Roadmap
We prioritized the features by giving each feature scores according to its value, the effort needed to implement the feature and the urgency of it. Eventually, we put the features into the product roadmap according to the total scores each feature has. The product roadmap was designed with agile methodology with each sprint having the duration of 2 weeks.
