Within the fast paced world of modern society, the old adage of patience being a virtue is firmly a thing of the past. Consumers expect immediacy, and businesses must deliver, or risk falling so far behind that they may cease to exist.

Gambling is certainly not immune. A reliance on human oversight can lead to major delays in customer verification. Additionally, significant wait times can also ensue as documents are verified by operators as players try to complete transactions.

Warren Russell, Founder and CEO of eyeDP, elaborates on the current state of such processes within the industry, as well as the headwinds being experienced, what needs to be done to raise these to the necessary level of quality, and how AI technology should be used to speed this up and help companies stay ahead.

SBC News:To what extent do you believe compliance bottlenecks are damaging the overall customer experience?

Warren Russell: I think that it’s the single biggest issue. Regulations are getting tighter, which is putting more pressure on operators. People are also having to provide more information, and all of that process just adds on minutes and hours. 

The gaming industry is also quite impulsive. If I’m on my app it’s because I want to place a bet now, I’m not thinking about something that I might do in three weeks time, and I don’t have the time to wait. 

Specifically, financial vulnerability, affordability and player protection for gambling is probably the biggest place where the pinch is being felt, because you’ve got someone who’s potentially been a customer for weeks, months, years, and is now suddenly having to go through a due diligence process that they didn’t have to do before. 

They don’t understand why. It’s their money. They’re not criminals. They can do what they want, and for 99 per cent or higher there is no issue. 

While we’re putting these controls to protect the less than one per cent, which is the right thing to do,it just means that you’ve got a slow turnaround, and that just causes massive frustration coupled with a lack of understanding.

The average person on the street simply doesn’t get why they’re having to go through all of this. As a result, customer churn is obviously a big issue. In such a competitive industry it has been for many years, and continues to be now.

SBCN: When it comes to customer churn, what are the critical issues in helping to reduce those numbers?

WR: As an operator you should put as much effort into designing your compliance processes, onboarding checks, fraud monitoring and everything else, as you do with your products. 

You have to make it an experience that is as pleasurable as it can be for the consumer. If you’re just running a checklist it becomes very boring, repetitive and difficult. A lot of these checks are repetitive and can be seen as intrusive, so try to make it smooth. 

You have to automate, automate, automate, and look for opportunities across the customer journey so that you maximise the happy path, and then use your highly trained, skilled people to deal with the more challenging cases. Hopefully that way you can reduce churn. 

But, let’s be honest, it’s a massively competitive industry. If I’m not happy with the service I’m getting from a supplier, I’ve got 500 others I can go to and choose from instantly. It’s a difficult one to solve.

It’s not just about bonuses and gains. It’s about whether you’ve turned compliance into a seamless experience, or people feel like they’re banging their head against a brick wall. 

SBCN: What implications can the impacts of customer verification have on an operator’s reputation, and where do you believe the solutions lie?

WR: There’s an old saying that’s something like ‘an unhappy customer tells the world, a happy customer tells their friend’.

People move in herds. Those that gamble actively will likely have lots of other people with similar hobbies in their networks. If they have a bad experience trying to get online with operator X, they will say ‘it was a nightmare, I’m never using them again’. 

A poor process around verification, either at onboarding or at any other point, gives you a bad name in the sector. You’re going to get baked in reputational harm. 

You’ve then got your regulatory stamp. If you’re doing it badly, you’re facing potential fines. You’ve not only got AML, but regulatory issues such as GDPR and things like that. I think inconsistency is a big issue. 

That’s where we need the industry as a whole to move, because if you’ve one operator who’s doing really lightweight stuff and perhaps even less than a tick box exercise, and then you’ve got others who are following the process properly, it just makes an inconsistent experience for the consumer. 

There’s probably not a week that goes by that one operator isn’t a headline. There’s always eyes on the sector. 

We need to be fast, fair and respectful. Like I’ve said before, I think that the solution is to be found by concentrating as much on UX from a compliance perspective, as you do from a game or sportsbook perspective.

Use the tools that are available to assist your people. There’s plenty of solutions out there to choose from, however, with the pace at which technology evolves, I’m not sure operators keep up to date and just stick with a decision they made several years ago just for ease. 

While many tools do what they say on the tin, there’s new kids on the block that can turn compliance into a bit of a weapon and a customer acquisition strategy. This can make you better than your competition by making you easier to interact with. It’s what Apple did with their whole iOS ecosystem, for example. It just makes it really easy. 

I think that gambling operators could learn a little bit from other sectors, and look at how we can ‘Steve Jobsify’ our world and remove unnecessary friction. 

SBCN: Looking at all of these issues that have been highlighted, how does eyeDP and the solutions within your locker ensure that clients can continue to soar?

WR: We have focused our time, energy and effort on the real bottlenecks. The documents that operators receive that they don’t necessarily want to receive, but they’re having to spend time on and sit there and go through manually.

We’ve built a platform that is specifically designed to maximise automation, minimise the human intervention required, but still gives you that level of comfort and oversight as though it were your team of highly experienced and skilled people doing the checks. 

It’s real time document verification, and real time document analysis and it works for cross border operators due to our multi-lingual capability. We can extract all of the data in any language and verify that against any third party sources the operator requires. 

We pull all of these data sources together, cross information contained in documents against case notes, external services and across documents captured from a customer – looking for risks, synergies, trends, discrepancies, whatever we are asked to. I think there are the best part of 100 risks we can identify at the moment, from document tampering to high risk transactions, to income discrepancies. You name it.

While there’s some highly skilled fraudsters out there who require advanced technologies and processes to spot, the majority of what happens, by volume, is through less sophisticated methods. You have a small number doing a lot of very clever fraud, but you have a big number doing some quite immature fraud.

It’s that bigger number that tends to take up the resources, but then you miss the more clever stuff that you really need your analysts working on. If we can help find and stop the sophisticated stuff and almost eradicate the really immature fraud, that’s where we can really add value.