Interview – 2020 will be all about compliance, regulation and responsible aggregation

As CasinoBeats marches on towards the second staging of our Malta event in March 2020, in an extended series we are to take a look back at last month’s CasinoBeats Summit in London.

Our next entry comes courtesy of Phil Parry, CEO of Iforium, who takes at look at the ever changing regulatory landscape.

Gamification, engagement tools, blockchain and split screen gameplay were popular subjects at this year’s CasinoBeats Summit, but in my view, as a content aggregator, much of this risks being window dressing. For us, it’s all about data, the processing of data and the player personalisation and communications that follow.

At Iforium, we’ve worked hard on our event driven architecture to provide a real-time stream of what players are doing both from a platform and compliance perspective, those who master that in the coming months and years will be the ones to watch. 

Compliance was also a major focus at CasinoBeats this year, as far as aggregators go when operating in Europe’s patchwork regulatory environment are doing. Combine that with machine learning on top, and you’ve cracked aggregation.

Regulatory bodies such as the UKGC, Isle of Man Gambling Supervision Commission, and the Malta Gaming Authority, to name just a few, have developed gold standards – and examples for others global emerging markets to follow; however within both this developed and developing environment, the challenge for today’s operators will be to identify the markets that are still profitable while finding ways to negotiate the complex web of rules and specifications required of them. 

By the time we’ve had the third annual CasinoBeats Summit in Barcelona next year, I believe regulatory markets will have become even more stringent in their requirements, with next generation aggregators required to be that first step of compliance; in effect doing the operator’s job for them when it comes to preparing and distributing aggregated content responsibility. 

We’re well positioned for this, with our Gameflex platform acting as a bridge between multiple content providers. As the middleman, we ensure this is ‘sanitised’ in that all content meets the regulatory demands of whichever market it is required to operate in. Where appropriate we also overlay our regulatory solution specific to the jurisdiction and local requirements needed to operate. 

Looking ahead to 2020 it is the speed of regulatory change that is going to leave operators out of pocket when they fail to keep up.

Sweden’s regulatory fallout is a potential sign of things to come if operators cannot tailor their offering to a market’s regulatory needs – and it’s increasingly going to be the job of the aggregator who needs to provide, at source, a responsible foundation for the industry to build on.

This is exactly where you will find Iforium and our Gameflex platform, at the forefront of responsible aggregation in multiple markets and supporting both our operators and content providers.