Turn up to ICEi with with a chequebook and an outline plan to start a serious online gaming business, and providing your line of credit is good enough, you should be able to walk away after a day or so with orders placed for all the services and content you need – and quite probably a strategy and route to recruiting the specialist staff your launch business would need.
The remote gaming zone of ‘The London Show’, ICEi, started in 2000 and for the 2008 event had grown to occupy around 2,000 sq m of space on its own account,hosting 69 specialist suppliers, with a further 11 companies, including igaming software supplier Wagerworks, opting to set up shop in the body of ICE to unveil its 40 payline slot game Wolfe Run. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves on our shopping trip…
With something of the order of 30 different online gaming product sectors represented in the halls, ICEi truly has become a must-visit, one-stop-shop for anyone involved in remote gaming – and, indeed, for bricks-and-mortar operators who want to reach out to their customers off-site, and open up new revenue streams.
Visitors to ICEi had a choice of three governments to talk to, each keen to offer a base for igaming operators and competing on fiscal advantages as well as on the range of services that suppliers can offer licence holders within their national jurisdiction. Alderney’s Gambling Control Commission, for instance, promotes tax-free status for companies set up to hold an Alderney Egambling licence – qualifying companies pay no tax, VAT or other duties, just a fixed annual fee that’s not related to level of profits made. “The secure home of eGambling” is their national slogan, it seems.
The Isle of Man requires an annual licence fee of £35,000, and then levies betting duty on a scale that slides from 0.1 percent of gross gaming yield for operations with an annual turnover larger than £40 million, to 1.5 percent for an annual yield of £20 million or below. “Giving eGaming freedom to flourish” is the the IoM message.
Malta, which describes itself as ‘the European Hub of Online Gaming', offers licences in four classes, each of which attracts a licence fee around £5,250 and is subject to a different rate of gaming tax.
Within each national jurisdiction, the would-be operator will not only find support and advice from the public sector promoters, but also a host of specialist local companies with expertise in legal, financial and technical. “Online gaming solutions” was on the tip of a large number of exhibitor’s tongues, and cybergamingconsultants.com was just one company offering in-depth support services to operators – Dr Anthony Axisa, MD Cybergaming Consultants, is the co-author and drafter of the Remote Gaming Regulations that were published four years ago in Malta, so the company can very reasonably claim “there is no one who can help you better than Cybergaming Consultants to set up in Malta”. Axisa, a lawyer by profession, was the former legal and enforcement director of the Lotteries and Gaming Authority of Malta…
Delivering gaming, gambling or skill-based entertainment online in pay to play or play for fun configurations has probably never been easier, with a host of providers offering everything from a complete turnkey service that leaves a start-up with little more to do that choose content and channels, provide a brand and then point customers towards the screen…or perhaps the aim is to add community facilities or new entertainment/games to an existing online operation.
Chartwell, for instance, offers slots, card and table games, live common draw games, on-demand games, bingo which can be delivered to a variety of platforms and promoted and managed through its CyberBoss system with CyberBanx taking care of player payments and cash-outs. And coming soon from Chartwell, a kiosk system.
“Turnkey” was another well-used word on the ICEi floor. Greentube, for example, claims to run the No1 Player to Player network in Europe, based on multiplayer skill gaming that can be blended with more traditional gambling games and offered as casual gaming, high roller games for ‘pro’ oplayers, and gambling-style skill games. Tournaments, affiliate management, CRM and Marketing Tools, online community facilities and full back-office management are all part of the package – which is ultimately aimed at allowing operators with a customer base to add additional revenue to their current business and attracting new customers with a view to converting them to the core customer base.
With some suppliers, opening offers were tempting – 10 fully-branded poker sites for free was one show offer, from diamondace.com
Collecting money from customers, of course, is a key element of any package, and online or mobile gaming presents particular problems of its own – setting aside protectionist legislation that some countries have in place to keep non-local competitors out of their markets. Once you start making transfers across borders that involve currency exchanges, costs can make paying to play uneconomic for a large number of potential customers. It can, for instance, cost 15 Euro to get a UK cheque cashed and paid in to a French bank account. Prepaid cards are seen as the holy grail for giving customers easy access to online payments of all kinds, and while they don’t completely eliminate the potential for chargeback frauds, they are close to a ‘silver bullet’ – the customer has put money on the card before using it, and has no credit limit, so can only spend money that has been loaded on to the card. Indeed, there was almost a sub-show for online payment service providers, ranging from the high-level corporate capable of offering OEM-equivalent services, to prepaid card providers such as Tuxedo, which issues Mastercard prepaid cards. “Gaming operators can now cut back office costs dramatically and give their customers a simple, more attractive way to collect their winnings,” enthuses Mark Simon, CEO of Tuxedo Money Solutions. It doesn’t matter if players use other cards to place their bets. “Previously, winnings over the initial stake amount could not be paid out to any MasterCard card via the 7995 merchant code,” he explains. “But with our Pay and Play solution, customers can now get winnings paid out directly onto our Prepaid MasterCard card if we have integrated with the operator.” Integration with the operator can mean branded cards, as well as online transaction facilities… Variations on this theme were being promoted by entropay.com, intercash.com, click2pay.com, wirecard.com, and complete ‘white card’ systems can be had on the Visa or MasterCard platforms via altai-financial.com, to name a handful of payment providers.
Other online transaction systems don’t involve a physical card (which can be used to withdraw funds from an ATM or to pay for goods in the same way as a debit card can be used. Click2pay.com, for instance, claims to be the newest ‘online payment community’, and offers what are essentially online e-wallet services. Think PayPal, in its earlier days…
Fraud, of course, is endemic with cardholder not present transactions – even with Chip and PIN, it seems the total sum that the bad guys have extracted from innocent people’s traditional card accounts has gone up, owing largely to intensive use of stolen cards and details in physical territories where Chip and PIN is not yet supported at the point of transactions. So how to avoid chargebacks and other fraudulent use of your igaming service?
Fraudsters out there are getting organised, and collaborating to use new or existing accounts in cunning new, hard-to-spot ways, argues iovation, the company behind ReputationManager. Fraudsters are using advanced fraud tools to attack operators, and the answer, in simple terms, according to iovation is for online operators to band together and collaborate against the bad guys and girls. Iovation’s system is transparent to players, but identifies their devices, and once a fraud has been detected by one operator participating in ReputationManager, the fraud its reported against a device or its associated account(s). It’s an online, collaborative neighbourhood or shop watch scheme, in essence, which stops repeat offenders from succeeding by hiding behind multiple identities.
The key to effective risk management is to maximise fraud detection while minimising the number of customers the system turns away. Increasing player’s deposits is another key to maintaining profitability levels, according to Safecharge, which provides merchant accounts as a payment service processor which applies rules to individual accounts  in real time, to minimise online fraud and detect chargebacks. As well as flagging up customers who tend to be fraudulent, Safecharge’s system helps operators identify their more profitable players through a ‘transaction positive scoring’ system.
Getting the balance right between allowed transactions and fraud-risk levels is key, according to Ethoca, which pools information from a wide range of businesses operating customer-not-present transactions, by phone, fax, mail and online to share their transaction experience data and make more informed decisions. www.ethoca.com

CONNECTED TABLE

Perhaps the quirkiest hardware on show in ICEi this year was the Swedish product from Connected Table, which put a new spin on automated table games. Some of the software was still in development when at the show, but the hardware features touchscreens, trackballs is available as a 1-on-1 table, as well as in 6- and 8-player configurations.
Intended primarily as a poker table, but clearly capable of running a wide variety of screen-based games, the Connected Table, as its name suggests, can be connected to an existing gaming network, which could be local area, wide area – or internet.
Indeed, its designers suggest that using the table as a terminal to access internet games should mean that most operators should not need a gaming licence to operate it.

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