Department of Trust Founder & CEO: Compliance seen as a ‘necessary evil’

How does building financial and responsible gaming tools that benefit operators showcase additional benefits, such as for revenue, building trust and safer gambling?

The operators have a very difficult equation because the cost of acquiring a customer is very high, so just bringing that customer to the front door and getting them to even contemplate opening an account with you is an expensive business. Then you have to think... ‘well, what bonuses am I going to give this person, how am I going to convert them to a first deposit’ and so on. The challenge they have is needing to pay somebody to verify the data. That doesn't cost much, but it starts to add up if you find that actually you're getting a lot of fake registrations. Bonus abuse very often involves people using other people's identities to register. When you're registering just the information, you're not verifying the person. It could be someone completely different.  

That's very, very hard to do with a bank account because somebody would have to literally surrender their log-in credentials, which mostly use multi-factor authentication as well, and also makes it very easy to trace. This helps operators solve that equation. They're not wasting money in the funnel getting people to the door, and they're not having what I call a false sense of success. ‘Hey, we ran this campaign and we got 500 registrations.’ Well, that's great so long as 400 of them aren't the same person.  

I love this stuff. There are loads of other businesses out there helping operators solve parts of these problems, just to become that little bit more efficient and a little bit savvy, but also offering a better experience to the player. That, at the end of the day, is the most important thing. And efficiency is going to be really important in the UK particularly.  

Speaking on funnels and marketing spends, how important are tools such as these for the Department of Trust in the UK market going forward? 

We discussed this on a panel at ICE Barcelona. My view is that operators are now working in a completely different environment. It's been building for a while because of the increased regulation, but now the economics have changed in a really dramatic way. We can all be very sad and angry about it, but the reality is we've got to figure it out. The answer is not to try to save 5% here and 6% there or get rid of a few people here or there. It's time to re-engineer the business and the processes.  

There are a lot of things UK operators have solved in the past just by throwing people at the problem, particularly on the compliance side. The tech has just been too difficult and too complex, there are too many vendors and you don't know which way to go, so now they have to take a different approach. It's companies like ours, and there are other people as well doing different things, who can really, really help. It's not about becoming 10% more efficient, it's about becoming 50%, 60%, 70% more efficient.  

You once described compliance teams as being similar to mushrooms... perhaps you could explain the comparison and how your work can help change that narrative? 

The point of that joke is that compliance departments are the place where automation goes to die, but it's not particularly a UK problem. I've seen it around the world, (companies) treating compliance as a cost area and a problem; so it doesn't get the investment because it doesn't produce all the shiny new features, gaming experiences and fabulous marketing systems. It's just seen as a necessary evil. You've got compliance teams who are either ignored by the rest of the business or actively disliked and resented. There's no point in denying it – it's exactly how it is. By the way, it's the same in banks and financial services. Compliance is seen as the business reduction people. That's ridiculous.  

In the gambling sector; it's business enablement. Good compliance is a well-automated part of the process that enables you to grow your business faster because you can invest with confidence. If you don't know what the outcome of something's going to be, then the risk of your investment is much greater. And the compliance team can do that. That's what I meant by that, which is that the underinvestment in compliance needs to stop. I don't have a dog in that fight, but it just amazed me that at the senior level and the board level, these operators don't really appreciate the value that compliance can bring.