What Will Drive Lottery’s Next Chapter?

A conversation with Brightstar Lottery’s Marco Tasso, EVP and Chief Operating Officer, Global Lottery

By Brightstar Lottery

Published September 22, 2026

Marco Tasso has seen the lottery business from nearly every angle, having held various senior leadership roles at Brightstar Lottery and its predecessor company, including as Chief Operating Officer of International and Italy Operations, Senior Vice President of Global Supply Chain and Services, and Senior Vice President of Global Lottery Marketing. 

He previously served as CEO of Northstar Lottery Group, where he managed the first-ever U.S. private lottery management contract for the Illinois Lottery. He later oversaw similar private manager agreements in Indiana and New Jersey. Marco has also held leadership positions at Lottomatica in Italy, where he managed different business units including instant lotteries, lotto, and commercial services.

Recently appointed Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Global Lottery, he is responsible for all of Brightstar’s global lottery operations, including technology, product development, marketing, sales and product management, supply chain, customer support, and field services.

Drawing on decades of experience as an operator and supplier-partner, he discusses how real-world interaction is shaping innovation, and why, amid the rise of AI and new competition, understanding players and retailers remains lottery’s central task.

Photo: Max Felipe

The Six-Month Assignment That Lasted 15 Years

You’ve worked in international environments and sat on both sides of the table, giving you a broad perspective on the industry. What stands out or what did you learn about players from your time living and working in North America?

Marco Tasso: When I came to Chicago from Italy to support the start-up of our company’s private management contract in Illinois, I was supposed to stay for six months. Not long after, I was meeting with someone about a new supermarket chain we were trying to recruit. It turned out he’d also been sent to Chicago from another market while he was working for an Italian airline, and they told him, “No worries, in six months you’re going to come back.” He had been in Chicago for 40 years.

That day, I realized that probably my six months were not going to be six months. And, in fact, I ended up staying in the United States for 15 years. What stands out is that, of course, there are differences between markets, and even within a single jurisdiction you can find significant differences between players. You can analyze them and organize them into personas, but in the end, they are people. I think that in this industry, the most important aspect of our experience, the starting point where you're going to continue to build and evolve, is players — the people who buy our products. That is true for every business, of course, but I think it's particularly important for our industry because we deal with people’s aspirations to win. Lottery tends to touch very deep chords in everyone.

I view this as a level of responsibility that increases significantly as you’re looking at how to further develop the lottery business, because you can have a strong impact on people. You have to understand where they come from. It's very important in our company’s approach to partnering with customers that we leverage our global knowledge and experience, but we always want to do that with local knowledge and understanding. That's the reason why we build local teams everywhere we work.

Seeing Through the Player's Eyes 

Many vendor-partners now aim to offer solutions that are “player-first.” What does that look like in practice? 

For us it means, first of all, we have to know players. And knowing them doesn’t only involve extensive market research and hearing their opinions in focus groups. It’s also having a continuous channel of connection with what happens in the field, in a local market, physically meeting people in the stores where they’re buying lottery and hearing what they have to say about their experience. I visit retailers in person, and the more our teams do this, the more they know the value.

You have to meet players and retailers because you're going to get nuances that are hard to get from just the research. Research will give you very structured and powerful insights, but if you don’t also have some personal sense of that player’s experience or where their feedback is coming from, you risk interpreting data based on your preconceptions or expectations.

This applies also when we start building products to address what players said they wanted. We have to let them experience the result and be truly willing to listen to their feedback and learn from it. You could get an answer that you’re not necessarily going to like. There is always a lesson, too, when that happens. Because no matter what the player’s feedback is, the only thing that matters is what they like or appreciate. The direction they want to go in is pointing you to evolution.

This approach results in products and solutions that deliver what players want. We do this, for example, with post-launch player feedback, to further refine a game that’s already successful in the market and inform the next version. We pilot products with retailers and use the input to refine them. We study real user behaviors and preferences to optimize the interfaces on our products, and so on. And then, of course, we have teams that are dedicated to visiting retailers, where they’re with players daily and maintain that channel of connection.

“What If” to “What Works”

How do you view Brightstar’s role in bringing new ideas to market?

It’s core to what we do and how we serve customers and players. I think a relevant value we contribute is the fact that we play two roles. We are supplier-partners and also lottery operators, which gives us not only a shared perspective with our customers but also the means to validate the innovations. We involve our B2C experts from the early design stages, and, starting from an understanding of players and the market, we develop and build new products, test them in-market, deploy them in the way we expect to be optimal, measure the results, and use the learnings to improve them. And many of our customers are willing to pilot solutions or invest in ideas together.

We’re willing to stay open to feedback and share our experiences, and we welcome a two-way communication with customers. We know we have things to learn from them, and we also have learnings to share, so it's a win-win. For us, this kind of partnership is a must for evolving as an industry, and we believe in the value of it, versus a more traditional vendor relationship. This is how we try to build the relationship with every one of our customers around the world.

Sharing Across Markets

You recently stepped into a new global role. How will you interface with the company’s organization in North America?

One of my goals is to infuse our international experience into what we can do for customers in North America, and the other way around, by transferring what is truly relevant for a given market or lottery. Because, as we discussed earlier, it’s about understanding what will work where, how something fits with a specific culture and environment, rather than just importing a game or technology from one market to another.

In the U.S., our teams of experts bring vast knowledge of the market and experience with our customers here, built over decades, and I’ll continue to rely on their insights and collaboration. One of the many areas where our collaboration is going to be of value to customers is continuously improving this process of knowledge sharing and leveraging it on behalf of every single customer we serve.

Lottery is a global business, and there are a lot of interesting things happening all around the world in terms of innovation. Sharing learnings is vital. Particularly right now, when we are in the middle of a technological revolution. We’re all seeing the early stages of how AI is going to impact not just our business, but everything. It’s going to be a major topic of conversation at this year’s industry conferences, because we are all in a moment of transformation, regardless of geography.

Mindset Shift

Every industry is trying to figure out what that future is going to look like. How is Brightstar approaching this challenge for the lottery industry?

For our company, it means leveraging new technologies, yes, but just as importantly, rethinking how we approach every aspect of our business, the way our organization works, the kind of skills that are going to be important, the approach we need to have for every process, the future ways lotteries will interact with players. Because of the speed at which things are transforming, this cannot be done through the traditional approach of projecting exactly what the state of play will be five years into the future.

In moments like this, the mistake you could make is to consider the technology as your starting point. We know the guiding principle for us has to be: What is the desired future state that would be most beneficial for players, our customers, and the industry? And how can we use technology to actively make that a reality? It’s a mindset shift. That’s how we are approaching this moment of transformation, as attendees will see at the upcoming trade shows.

We want to offer lotteries the means to actively shape their future, with the ability to continually iterate, improve, and remain flexible. A year after becoming Brightstar, we are ready to show the first evidence of what we've been developing and the resources that are available to our customers. We’re building solutions that give our lottery partners the means to embrace a similar mindset and make it easier for them to continuously improve and innovate to maintain their relevance in the perception of players.

Finally, it’s critically important that the role and the responsibilities of lotteries be protected. We see competition coming from different angles with far less constraints than lotteries have, and with their lack of constraints there is a lack also of player protection. One of the most important values that lottery brings to the table is its responsibility toward players and beneficiaries. The industry needs to transform to ensure that it continues to play this fundamental role and provide for its beneficiaries for years to come.