The Singapore Pools was established in 1968 to provide a safe and trusted platform for people to place bets. Since then, it has adapted to meet changing gaming trends to ensure its ability to curb illegal betting syndicates and support responsible gambling among players. The organisation also aims to improve its processes to maximise its profits and contribute towards community welfare.
One of the ways it achieves this is by leveraging digital signage to promote its responsible gaming campaign across all its outlets and branches. This allows them to educate customers on the importance of playing responsibly, gambling within their means and dealing with problem gambling issues. Additionally, the company uses PADS4 to display event messages, lottery and betting updates on their nationwide network of digital signs.
In 2019, the company’s total revenue was close to S$9 billion, with the majority of that (65%) being returned to players as prize money. In addition, 5% of the proceeds is channelled to the Tote Board for redirected to charities and community development projects. This year, the company is also stepping up its efforts to further drive digitisation in its core business of numbers games and sports betting.
The organisation recently migrated its on-premises applications monitoring system to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) in order to enhance operations. This allowed them to monitor all layers of their application stack in a secure, highly available and high-performance environment. With this, the company can now resolve issues in minutes instead of hours, reducing downtime and ensuring a smoother experience for their customers.
To further empower its employees, the company engaged Collective Campus to run two one-day tech crash courses for the staff. These sessions covered ideation methods, innovation theory and key tools for effective technology adoption. They helped the team understand what is happening in this era of disruption and how to best harness new technologies to innovate and grow the business.
The Singapore Pools has also dedicated a significant amount of time and resources to charity. In 2018, it launched iShine Cloud, a charity that provides other charitable organisations with affordable and integrated IT solutions. iShine Cloud helps charities improve their productivity, governance and efficiency so that they can focus on serving the public. To date, it has onboarded 31 charities and 1,512 users on its iShine Cloud platform.