You’re probably familiar with the names 4D and TOTO, but how much do you know about the establishment that brings you these betting games? Singapore Pools was established more than half a century ago, on 23 May 1968!

Since its inception, Singapore Pools has played a major role in fighting illegal gambling. Their mission was to provide people who bet with a safe and trusted environment, so that they can channel their winnings back into supporting the community through charities instead of lining the pockets of illegal bookies.

With this mission in mind, they have embarked on a digitalisation journey to stay on top of gaming trends and remain effective in stemming leakages to illegal gambling operators while upholding strict regulations. They partnered with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to migrate their on-premise applications monitoring system to the cloud, so they can improve IT operations and deliver better service to their customers.

In the 2019/2020 financial year, Singapore Pools collected close to S$9bn in lottery and sports bets, of which about 70% was returned to winning players and the rest was collected as taxes and donations. Of this, 5% went to the Tote Board to support arts and community development, charity, education, health, and sports sectors while 3% was used for operating costs.

As part of its corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, Singapore Pools also set up iShine Cloud in 2018. iShine Cloud is a non-profit IT social enterprise that provides other charities with a comprehensive suite of charity-specific solutions on a secure cloud-based IT platform at a discounted rate. Since its inception, iShine Cloud has onboarded 24 new charities and more than 400 users to date.

The iShine Cloud team is looking to continue to grow their user base and expand its services in order to help more charities with their digital transformation efforts. In the near future, iShine Cloud plans to introduce additional functionality and features to its solution, such as a dashboard that will enable charities to track their data and performance. Additionally, the team hopes to bring in more partners who can complement its offering with their own solutions.

As for the iShine Cloud app itself, it’s currently only available for iOS devices. However, the team has promised that an Android version will be out soon. In the meantime, Android users can access the app’s content on their gizmos or devices by visiting the official website.