The South Carolina Lottery is updating its platform to meet the preferences of modern customers, specifically the way they pay for tickets.
The state lottery has been a stonewall cash-only business throughout its history, but with more and more Americans using cards to pay, the lottery seems to have taken a logical step.
Lottery retailers will be able to sell draw tickets and scratchcards via debit card and contactless debit card payments. The decision has been permitted via a provision in the South Carolina state budget for 2025/26.
The move may come as a welcome one for South Carolina’s extensive network of grocery and convenience stores, many of which may have seen customers pay for most items with debit cards but lottery tickets via cash, creating some inconvenience at checkout.
Having said that, debit card usage in America is not as widespread as it is in Europe, where cards and particularly contactless cards are the leading payment method by a long-shot, and where payments via cash are slowly swindling.
Estimates from payments firms like Wise put the number of Americans who have a debit card at 93%. However, debit cards are only used for around 30% of in-store payments, suggesting that the US remains a cash dominated country despite its leading advancements in technology and fintech.
Regardless, the state government has clearly noticed an uptick in debit card usage among South Carolina residents and believes that changes need to be made at a retail level to accommodate this change.
“Technology and the way we use it has changed over the decades,” said Greg Hembree, a Senator and Senate Education Committee Chairman, earlier this year when the move first appeared in the state budget. “We’re simply catching our statute up to the modern way people use money.”
Payments are, as with other gambling industry verticals, an important part of the customer journey for lottery providers.
This has been recognised by multiple stakeholders, with UK National Lottery operator Allwyn upgrading its payments infrastructure earlier this year, for example, while other government-backed lotteries like that of Buenos Aires in Argentina have embraced the use of QR codes.