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Experian
Not a new age, exactly – but a new way of looking at age verification for land-based casinos. Casino International found out more…
Experian is well-known among consumers as a credit reference agency, where one can obtain a credit report on request for a small fee. There's a lot more to the company than that, and their expertise reaches far and wide. Said expertise is now being applied, with some success, to casinos for the purposes of age verification. James Blake, Head of Authentication, spoke to Casino International about what they can offer the modern casino…
Casino International: What is Experian? What skills do you have in age authentication?
James Blake: Experian is a vast organisation with offices across the globe – in the UK, Europe, the Americas, India, Asia, Far East, everywhere. The solutions we actually offer now go beyond credit, and have done for many years. The division I work in specialises in electronic ID which really centres around fraud prevention, anti money laundering, and proving that an individual is who they claim to be. That then expanded out into age verification client requirements changed, In the case of the gaming industry, the Gambling Act came in, which required organisations to verify that people are who they claim to be, that they’re not fraudsters, they’re not money launderers, they’re also old enough to enter a casino, or an online gaming environment.
CI: Assuming I’m an operator, how does this work?
JB: The way it works currently in any of the casinos that use our solution is, I go in, and they take my personal information from me. They [on the front desk] take my postcode; from that postcode, we would take the full address of the individual with their name, we’d catch that information, we’d then ask their date of birth. Depending on the circumstances, we may also ask for other information such as time at address, previous address or mother’s maiden name. Once that information is taken we send that to our data centre in Nottingham to verify the information they’ve given against a number of unique data sources, and that result would be returned, which will tell you whether that person is who they claim to be; it will also flag if there are any fraud, money laundering or under-age risks, whatever the criteria may be.
CI: How long does this process take?
JB: It’s sub- two seconds for a response from us – the only hold-up is how long it might take a member of staff to type the details in. When we did some analysis, one of the benefits the casino found was speeding up that application process; instead of having to fill out your full name and the rest of your details and those be typed in, they only had to put in a postcode and house number. That information is then returned straight away and the date of birth is input, and at that point we then send it out. It was taking around about ten seconds to fill out the information, and a two-second response rate from there.
CI: If someone enters a casino and wants to join, what mechanisms are you using to validate who that person is? Photo ID is obviously forgeable, so it might not be their details – how do you reconcile that?
JB: Experian compares the data submitted by the customer against its anti-fraud databases. We look for any inconsistencies in the data that might indicate that the applicant is not who they claim to be. For example, would be we’d look at the data and say right, James Blake, does the information that he has submitted match all the other records that we hold on James Blake; did he get it right? We would then look at activity against his profile. For example, whether he has applied for an unusual amount of credit recently, whether there have been known frauds against his address or whether there is a redirect on his mail. That’s some of the ways we deal with identity fraud and money laundering. Of course, if your son or your father has stolen your identity and they have not yet been involved in unusual activity that would arouse suspicion, it’s very difficult then to prove that they’re not who they claim to be.If that is the case, then the staff on the front desk should use their judgement and seek further proof of age and identity if they are in doubt.
CI: So you’re not saying this is flawless, but you are saying that it’s pretty reliable.
JB: What we’re saying is that nothing is 100 per cent accurate. On average we can identify 40 per cent more frauds using our authentication, and that’s by using things like Detect. We also have a fraud score card, in that we’re looking at patterns of data. We’ve looked at a number of patterns of identities for fraud cases over the last 20 years and we’ve taken that information to create a fraud score card which might say, an identity fraud looks like this, if this person's pattern looks like that we’ll flag that as a risk.
Using these 'flags', we’re by no means saying that person is a fraudster, what we’re saying is it’s something you need to look at in more detail; what Authenticate is designed to do is give more information, so the majority of your customers will go through fine, there won’t be any issues with it, there will be some, a minority, we’ll be unsure about, and there’ll be others we’ll flag as high risk alerts. It could be that they flag up on the sanctions data. Sanctions information is basically the government's list of individuals that they don’t want you, as an organization, having a financial relationship with, and we have access to those lists.
In summary, the majority of the customers go through ok, other’s we’ll say we haven’t got enough information about them, we need to just look into these in more detail and that could involve going and taking paper-based proof of identity, and then there’ll be the very small percentage of people that will be called a high risk alert. We can’t tell that this person is a danger, what we can do is tell you that you need to look into it in more detail.
CI: Is your main USP the initial speed for the customer?
JB: Our sub-two second response rate is a selling point, but I think the main strength of Authenticate over our competitors is the huge data resources we have, which give you more information; it’s the length, breadth and depth of data. Most of our competitors will do a tick in a box, find James Blake and say right, he exists; we analyse that data very quickly and look back and say right we found him, but where have we found him? Is it a good data source? How far back in society does he go? We do a lot more analysis on that, therefore we can prove the identity of people, we can find more people and also give you a confidence level that they are who they claim to be.
CI: This is presumably a product you can use internationally?
JB: It is, yes. It’s different country to country as you can imagine, but the input of data and the process we work on a high level is the same. The data resources in each country are slightly different, and legislation obviously is different in each country as well.
CI: From your customer feedback, what are the casinos seeing as the main benefit of Authenticate?
JB: Simplicity. We’ve talked a lot about the processes, how we match data, depth, breadth, and quality, but in the end the reason why they bought this solution is that we could verify identity, verify age, and we could do it quickly and easily, and it’s easy for the operators to use, and that is key to what we are doing.
Neither we nor our customers want people being turned away needlessly, and in the end what we showed we could do is increase the number of people who go through the door. So if those individuals forget their passport or driving licence because they didn’t think they were coming out tonight, they can now actually let them in provided they pass the electronic checks. So it's increased the number of people coming through the door.
CI: What’s the cost – is it an expensive proposition for a casino?
JB: It’s not expensive. All the casinos using it are seeing a quick return in investment, most organisations are looking at a return of investment within two years, and we’re often finding that to be much, much quicker. It more than pays for itself.
