Product Overview
We are currently in the process of integrating with a new service provider.
The Electrum Lotto Service facilitates the purchase of tickets for specific National Lottery game draws. The Electrum platform processes incoming requests from the originating system by translating the messages and routing them to Ithuba, the current service provider for the National Lottery.
The games currently supported are listed below.
- LOTTO, LOTTO Plus 1, and LOTTO Plus 2
- Powerball and Powerball Plus
- Daily LOTTO Plus
- Sportstake 8
- Sportstake 13
- LOTTO 658, LOTTO 658 Plus 1 and LOTTO 658 Plus 2
High-Level Architecture
The figure below depicts the high-level architecture of the Electrum Lotto Service. The originating system — which could be a digital channel, or an in-store point of sale — communicates with the Electrum Switch via the Electrum Lotto Service Interface. The Electrum Switch in turn connects to the Lotto service provider. Electrum Finance supports transaction matching, reconciliation and financial reporting. The Electrum Console is the system's user interface which provides tools for transaction lookup, configuration, reporting, and the back-office functions.
Service Providers
The current service provider for this product is Ithuba.
The service provider may be changed in the future due to rules set out by the National Lotteries Commission. A change to the service provider will not affect your current implementation of the Electrum product. Note that a testing cycle might be needed if the service provider changes.
Transactions
The transaction types supported are listed in the table below.
| Transaction | Description |
|---|---|
| Get game rules | Retrieve the game rules for a specific game from the service provider on a regular basis as required. This is needed in order to process transactions for that day. |
| Place a wager | Request to place a new wager, that is, the purchase of a new Lotto ticket from the service provider |
| Confirm a wager | Confirms or finalises placing a new wager |
| Reverse a wager | Reverses a wager request |
Ithuba supports another endpoint that provides further game information, including:
- The amounts won in the previous draw.
- The number of winners per tier in the previous draw.
- The estimated and guaranteed jackpots for the upcoming draw. (Note: this is unrelated to the information supplied by the Get Game Rules transaction described above.)
Electrum does not integrate with this interface, therefore it is not part of our standard Lotto offering.
If originating systems wish to access this information they can integrate directly to Ithuba regarding this specific endpoint, if business rules allow it. Alternatively, individual consumers can access this information by visiting the Ithuba website.
This service supports both dual and single message flows. Confirmation transactions are used only in dual messaging systems.
Terminal Limitations
Ithuba requires that their partners who integrate into them maintain a maximum of 100 active terminals at a time. This means that only 100 transactions may be in-flight across a transaction channel within the downstream originating systems that integrate into Ithuba to facilitate the purchasing of Lotto wagers. Electrum's systems have been designed to handle this terminal limit on behalf of the originating system. Electrum employs a terminal handler that tracks the number of requests received and increments a counter for each. Once the counter reaches 99, it resets to 0 and begins counting again.
Game Cut-Off Periods
When the service provider has an upcoming draw for a game, the cut-off period to place wagers for that game is 20:30 on the day of that draw. The service provider's system will reject all wagers placed for that game until 06:00 the next morning.
Electrum Finance
Electrum Finance is a collection of tools to facilitate the reconciliation of transaction records between multiple parties, calculation of principal settlement amounts and fees, and generation of reports required for finance processes.
For more details of the processes and available features, see our Electrum Finance pages as well as this section of the Electrum Console help guide.
Tools for Support and Monitoring
Transaction Lookup
The Transactions screen of the Electrum Console provides a detailed view of each transaction processed by the Electrum Switch. Here you can perform the following to help troubleshoot potential issues:
- Filter transactions based on various parameters
- Search for a specific transaction by its unique reference
- View a summary of pertinent data for individual transactions
- View the full request and response message traces between the originating system and the Electrum Switch
- View the full request and response message traces between the Electrum Switch and the service provider
For more details on how to use these features, see the Transactions page of the Electrum Console help guide.
Kibana Dashboards
Electrum uses the Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana (ELK) stack for low-level application monitoring. To assist you with supporting your services, we provide you with access to preconfigured Kibana dashboards to visualise traffic being processed by the Electrum Switch. The following dashboards are available:
- Message overview
- Message cog detail
- Health check
- Store-and-forward (SAF) queue
Alerts are also configured to send email notifications when the system health changes.
For more details on each dashboard type and its use, see the Monitoring and Alerts page.
Connectivity and Security
The connectivity and security protocols between the Electrum Switch and the service provider, Ithuba, is via a VPN.
The standard connectivity and security between the originating system and the Electrum Switch is via HTTPS using basic authentication and server-side SSL. This requires that endpoints are allowlisted. The following additional security options are also available if required:
- HTTPS using basic authentication or OAuth2
- HTTPS using basic authentication or OAuth2 in conjunction with mTLS1.2+
- Connection via VPN
See here for more information about authentication options.
The requirements for connectivity and security must be discussed with Electrum prior to implementation.