In 2018, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision for the gaming industry, ruling that the individual states had the power to legalize sports betting at their own discretion. Five years later, the floodgates have opened. With an annual growth rate of 15.4%, Bloomberg is predicting roughly $200 billion in bets will be placed by the end of 2023.
Customer acquisition & compliance: Threading the needle
For sportsbook operators, the gold rush for players is on, and it presents a number of challenges. Compliance, customer experience, and fraud are just a few of the items that concern iGaming leaders. With many online betting platforms, the customer verification process can take upwards of 48 hours, often inducing the player to find a different platform to facilitate their bet.
How do gambling companies create a quick and friendly customer acquisition process while ensuring they capture everything required for regulations and fraud prevention? Data shows that if a player has an account with a particular platform, they are more likely to continue doing business on that platform in the future. The challenge therefore lies in balancing security with customer experience. How can registration be performed in seconds while verifying that the ID document presented by the would-be player isn’t fraudulent?
Luckily, new technology can play the primary role in allowing operators to focus on their growth instead of worrying about customer acquisition or compliance. To select the right player registration technology, look for the following 3 key capabilities:
Key 1: Automation and orchestration
A frictionless registration process reduces the amount of time and effort a player has to go through to do business with a vendor. For iGaming, this is increasingly challenging due to compliance requirements in the form of identity and address authentication.
Through automation capabilities, operators can capture the address and age on an ID, validate restrictions, and auto-populate details on required forms in one single flow. This reduces the time it takes to complete registration forms and creates a better customer experience. Look for solutions that can orchestrate and register new players in under 2 minutes to minimize customer abandonment.
Key 2: Liveness and biometrics
Typically, an operator needs to know if a person is of gambling age and if they can gamble in a particular state given their home address. At a casino, it’s easy to verify in person that someone matches their ID, but with digital registration, it is much more difficult—especially with the proliferation of deepfakes, synthetic IDs, and other AI-generated spoofs.
State-of-the-art technology in the field of natural vision processing (NVP) now can deliver computer-driven facial validation with accuracy rates of 99.99%, also known as the “four nines,” the new industry benchmark. Liveness can also be determined by the newest tech. Combined with solutions that can easily be implemented via cloud-native APIs, operators can realistically expect the best technology providers to deliver positive ROI within months, not years as with previous human-based validation flows.
Key 3: Going beyond registration
Lastly, operators can use the same automation technology to enhance the players’ experience throughout the customer journey. Once a person proves their identity in the registration phase, look for technology that has additional applications during the transaction and even the offboarding phase.
Just as Apple has normalized the use of facial biometrics to unlock gated access, operators can utilize faces to secure player accounts so customers can make deposits and withdrawals effortlessly. To prevent account takeover, live facial reauthentication checks can be triggered for high-risk transactions. This technology is already being widely used in other industries—financial services, insurance, and telecom to name just a few—and now gaming operators can utilize it to enhance the way they do business.
About the post:
Image is generative AI-created. Prompt: Happy hamster in a pot of gold photorealistic. Program: DALL-E.
About the author:
Garrett Freehling has 8 years of experience working in technology. He is passionate about solutions for everyday problems and is constantly looking for the latest and greatest in tech. Garrett’s background is in payments, customer experience, automation, and data management.
