Product Overview
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 Sizekhaya Holdings, the current service provider for the National Lottery.
The games currently supported are listed below.
- Daily LOTTO
- LOTTO
- LOTTO Plus 1
- LOTTO 5MAX
- Powerball
- PowerBall Xtra
In addition to standard board selection, the games listed above support MultiPlay, an optional play mode that provides a player with multiple boards automatically generated from all possible combinations from a single number selection.
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 Sizekhaya Holdings.
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 |
This service supports both dual and single message flows. Confirmation transactions are used only in dual messaging systems.
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.
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, Sizekhaya Holdings, 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.