Gaming Innovation Group is widely acknowledged as an industry leader in advancing operators into regulated markets via its platform. Director of Sales & Business Development Martin Collins, and Technical Compliance Business Director Daniel Files, explain all to CasinoBeats.
CasinoBeats: GiG has earned a robust reputation as something of a specialist in helping operators access regulated markets quickly and efficiently. Can you talk about some examples of where the company has been particularly successful and why?
MC: It has been clear for many years that ‘regulated’ markets are where the industry has been heading. Ever since those first European markets, it was clear that customer safety and the ever-increasing share of online wallets across all of gambling was heading in this direction. As a consequence, as a platform provider, we adopted this strategy very early and have been on an incredibly interesting learning curve ever since.
Indeed, given there is a fairly low level of harmonisation between jurisdictional frameworks, waiting to see what factors would be included for a new jurisdiction is always an interesting day at GiG. In terms of examples, we tend to find jurisdictions where we commit early and have both existing and new customers in the pipe is where we excel.
Ontario would be a recent example of this. As soon as we knew the framework, we worked hard to understand the gap between the requirements and our platform offering, whilst also understanding what level of documentation was required by our customers and us to provide to the regulator within the application process. During this, we were constantly monitoring data coming from the analysts and ensuring our initial analysis was accurate and nothing new was revealed that could impact the viability of the market.
Today, we are operating with two brands in Ontario, with a further four in the pipe. I suppose you can say via our constant analysis and use of data and compliance experts, we build a compelling offering for the market that we can believe in both internally as a business, but also externally with new and existing customers.
CasinoBeats: The GiG platform has been developed to optimise, among other things, speed to market. Can you tell us more about that and how it helps smooth the path to market entry?
MC: Localisation is the key to success in any jurisdiction. Even two jurisdictions right next to each other can have considerable differences in terms of the payment providers utilised, the games that are prominent and the KYC integration required to be compliant.
As a consequence, the ability to integrate new solutions quickly and efficiently is key to success, ensuring you can launch in a new jurisdiction as quickly as possible, acquiring customers and understanding their interaction with your solution.
Via our previous platform experiences and via feedback from the market, we realised that when making improvements, integration time was vital to a successful platform strategy. Luckily, we have some fantastic architects and developers who have created templates for payments, games and KYC integrations, to name but a few, and it means 75 per cent of the integration work is done in hours.
All integrations have elements of bespoke work, but it means that we are delivering content providers in two weeks, PSPs in three and more complex integrations like KYC and even sportsbooks in four weeks maximum. This provides us with a massive advantage over our competition and delivers a truly efficient and agnostic scenario to localise.
CasinoBeats: In what other ways does your platform give operators a competitive advantage and what makes it stand out from the competition?
MC: I think the key competitive advantage offered by the GiG platform to operators is the ability to truly personalise the customer experience. Via Logic, our rules engine and consequent, automated tagging, you can build up a profile of the customer that allows you to truly segment them on the basis of their interactions with the brand.
For example, you know exactly what campaign they came from, you know which sports or even team they like to bet on, as well as aspects right down to the payment provider they like to use. You can literally tag anything against any of the 250 data events and infinite data subsets we have in our system. Armed with this level of granularity, you can then build customer journeys on the basis of the tagging and create experiences specific to them. Something they will almost certainly not get from other operators.
In Europe, we saw the ‘churn and burn’ mentality for many years and in a bid to dominate new jurisdictions, some in the US have been using similar tactics to gain critical mass. However, if you want to sustainably build a brand in our space, how you personalise the experience of the customer will build loyalty and drive a much more compelling lifetime value and ultimate return on investment.
CasinoBeats: What advice would you give to operators around the common pitfalls and mistakes that they should seek to avoid when approaching regulated markets?
DF: Most importantly there are different phases of deploying into a new market and they aren’t necessarily sequential, but can be completed in parallel. Once an operator decides to go into a market and the operator has a deal signed with an internet gaming licence holder, the third party providers and key personnel must go through the licensing process to ensure suitability.
In many cases, operators may not even have their full team established at this point, but we would advise to confirm which team members require licences and start the process as soon as practical. Many factors are taken into account during the suitability evaluation and the process takes time to complete.
The second phase is meeting regulatory requirements for the hardware and software and developing internal and operational controls. The advantage to leveraging a platform like ours, is that we’re already certified by and familiar with the independent test lab testing, field testing and security assessment evaluation and processes.
GiG employs personnel specialising in understanding the unique requirements and needs of regulated markets and ensures all aspects of the platform meet the needs of the regulating agency in those markets. This means the operator can focus on getting their operational controls in place in conjunction with the functionality GiG’s platform offers.
CasinoBeats: From your perspective as a regulated market expert, what key qualities should operators be looking for when sourcing a platform provider?
DF: It’s important to ensure that their platform provider has the experience and bandwidth to handle post go-live functions. In other words, go-live is not the finish line, it’s simply a checkpoint. After the go-live date, it’s imperative to ensure the platform is kept up to date with the latest updates and have response teams for anything that may come up on the live system.
We have therefore established change management processes and procedures to ensure the platform is kept up to date including delivering the required documentation and notifications to both our partners and the regulators.
Through our well-established relationships with the regulators, we support our partners in their contact with them to work through any questions or unclarities. At GiG, we ensure a technically compliant product for any regulated market, to allow our partners to focus on their daily operations.
