SEEING THE LIGHT

Light & Wonder Gaming CEO Siobhan Lane speaks to Gaming America’s Tim Poole for a Huddle video interview at ICE London 2023.

At ICE London, we turned our N1 stand into a live video interview studio, where some of the industry’s biggest and most influential CEOs, executives and consultants took part in Huddle Q&As. Light & Wonder Gaming CEO Siobhan Lane joined us to reflect on the supplier's Retail Supplier of the year win at the Global Gaming Awards, the business’ transformation and much more.

Hello, viewers. Tim Poole here with Siobhan Lane, Light & Wonder Gaming CEO. We’re especially pleased to have you on because you were part of Gambling Insider magazine’s CEO Special. Could you talk us through what it was like to take part in that interview?

It was a great experience. Thank you for the opportunity. It was such a great platform to talk about all the changes and transformation that are happening at Light & Wonder, previously Scientific Games, and really focus on what we’re trying to do for our creators; and, of course, building great products and services for customers. There are a lot of exciting things going on, so we’re happy to have a platform like that.

That’s our pleasure. I’m going to ask a little bit more about those transformations and the rebrand later on. But first, as you know, I love the quote you shared in the interview, where you said your job is to enable your team’s superpowers. I wanted to hear more about that because we thought that was a great thing for a CEO in the gaming industry to say.

I love that idea. I’m really passionate about building great teams. I think the greatest teams are diverse teams – they’re really complimentary – so all of us have a superpower, and it’s a great question to ask in interviews: what do you bring to the table? What’s your differentiator? And so when I think about building teams and highly complementary teams, I think about it as a collection of superpowers.

When you bring really high-performing people together that have those complimentary superpowers, you get this exponential impact and it’s quite amazing, actually, the power of a team and certainly individuals. But, again, when you bring that collective superpower together, it can have such a huge impact.

Your success is speaking for itself right now, because Light & Wonder was victorious at our Global Gaming Awards London, taking home the Retail Supplier of the year Award. Can you talk us through how that felt and that peer recognition for your recent performance?

It all goes back to our creators – for them to have the recognition. We’ve been through a lot of change as an industry; the last time we were at ICE London, it was right before the Covid-19 pandemic (at least the February ICE). So it’s a great acknowledgement of all our creators’ hard work, all their efforts over the last few years; not only has our industry gone through a lot of change but we, as an organization, have gone through a lot of change.

Any recognition and acknowledgment of the job our team has done helps keep them motivated, and keeps them aspiring to be the very best – and it is so great to see. I’m just thankful we were able to take home that Award, so thank you for that recognition.

You mentioned transformation earlier and, of course, I guess it doesn’t get much bigger in terms of transformation than a total rebrand – which Scientific Games went through to become Light & Wonder. How happy are you with how this name and identity change has gone through?

We’re very happy with it; I know it was a bit of a shock to the industry. When we announced the name, it was a shock to many of our creators as well. But really, a name is just a name. At the end of the day, what is so critically important to build a brand and make a name successful is you have to make real change. We used this analogy as we were going through the naming process – and the name is just an empty vessel. You have to really fill that vessel with meaningful things like values, behaviours, leadership, opportunities and development – and really walk the talk, if you will.

I think that’s what we’re most proud of. We knew it was a big opportunity, but because we were changing and transforming in so many ways, the Scientific Games name was born with and naturally belongs with that lottery business. So when we made the decision to divest lottery, we knew the name would go with that business. It was a real opportunity to go big and, more importantly, make sure we’re following up on filling that vessel with really meaningful things.

Ultimately, we wanted to create a company that would retain our creators, and get them excited and passionate about what we’re doing here; but also attract new creators to our industry or to our organization. It’s different, it’s fresh, but that was really done with intention. Hopefully the shock has worn off and, like you said, we’re very, very happy with it. We think it’s been a successful rebrand and we’ll just continue to fill that vessel with amazing things.

We are planning far out in our development cycles and making sure we have our eye on the horizon, and looking around those corners. That’s really important to us; now that we have completed the divestitures, we’re a very focused company, so making great content and games is the number one focus of ours: building great enabling technologies and systems. So it’s great to have a streamlined organisation. We have a healthier balance sheet, so we’re able to invest in our creators, our technology and our games in research and development; because we know that’s what makes our customers successful. So we’re laser-focused on that and just making sure we deliver – we want our customers to be successful. ‘We exist because they exist’ is what we like to say. All of our creators are really laser focused on this streamlined organization and streamlined mission. I think the great thing about ICE is that it is land-based gaming, but also real money. Digital gaming is very prevalent in the European market, so it’s just a great demonstration of this multi-channel and continued convergence of the gaming industry. And that’s really our vision. We are the leading cross-platform global games company, so all this great content we make, we can distribute it across those many channels of gaming. We’re really focused on delivering on that vision.