iGaming Compliance: Are We Seeing The Full Picture? With Sonia Wasowska, Compliance Director, Crucial Compliance

As we look towards the future of compliance and creating more sustainable lifetime player values, we caught up with Sonia Wasowska, Compliance Director and MLRO at Crucial Compliance to hear her thoughts on a 360-degree risk management approach. 

Many view iGaming compliance tech as a tool purely for player behaviour automation and modelling, providing compliance teams with the information to manage and interact with players at scale. However, there are many other ways in which these types of tools can add value, especially when considering the wide range of potential risks for operators in the market.

This article will outline some of the additional case studies and utilisation of compliance tech in a broader context of 360-degree risk management. This involves creating full customer profiles, including AML risk scoring, markers of harm, ongoing monitoring, and easy access to information enabling documentation of decision-making. It will also focus on leveraging tools from solutions providers like Crucial Compliance to support resource management as well as easier access to data and reporting.

Compliance Program and Regulatory Evidence

Delivering a compliance program requires tailoring business practices to compliance requirements, aiming to achieve regulatory resilience and the best outcomes for our teams and customers. That includes monitoring regulatory changes, making policies and processes business and product-specific, and testing the implementation of company policies via ongoing audit, quality assurance, and evaluation.

What we, compliance professionals, do can be looked at as ongoing business risk management documented to provide necessary regulatory evidence of compliance with licensing requirements from a practical implementation and consumer impact perspective. 

Documentation of regulatory and operational compliance activities should provide regulatory resilience when facing scrutiny, audits, and investigations by respective regulators.

A Case for a More Sustainable Operations Function and Player Sustainability

Operational challenges often revolve around resource planning, including staff turnover and absence management. Maintaining a consistent approach to training and quality assurance exercises can also be resource-heavy when relying on manual reporting and maintaining numerous spreadsheets. 

Compliance tech can alleviate these challenges by offering tools that streamline resource management, track training progress, and provide instant access to quality assurance data. This assistance helps in setting clear quality benchmarks and conducting reality checks to evaluate whether operational activities align with compliance goals. It helps answer critical questions: What do we expect, and what is happening in reality? This continuous feedback loop drives improvements and strengthens regulatory resilience. 

Tailored, easily accessible, and amendable reporting dashboards enable focus on the higher impact activities more specific to team development and testing customer outcomes. Providing solutions that make onboarding easier via more intuitive platforms designed specifically for the task, as well as ongoing management of the application of processes rather than maintenance of process-related tools, has an impact not only on the day-to-day performance of the team but also on customers. Here, the pain points disappear, and full attention can be devoted to analysing and documenting outputs rather than struggling with a system issue or coordinating a number of data access points.

One of the key advantages is providing easy access to data and reporting. In a highly regulated industry like iGaming, having intuitive platforms that allow compliance teams to access critical information, generate exception reports, and visualise data through dashboards is invaluable. By regularly monitoring these reports, operators can proactively address emerging risks and adapt their strategies accordingly. This empowers compliance professionals to make informed decisions, respond swiftly to emerging risks, and demonstrate transparency to regulatory authorities.

Compliance tech can also enhance training processes by offering interactive modules, simulations, and real-time tracking of employee progress. This not only ensures that staff are well-equipped to meet compliance requirements but also simplifies the documentation of training activities – a crucial aspect of regulatory evidence.

360-degree Risk Management – Single View of Player Activity

The regulatory expectations around single customer view and analysing the overall customer activity mean having to pull information from numerous sources and providers managing challenges related to creating a 360-degree view of player activity. 

The whole picture of a customer’s behaviour, as well as visibility of all compliance and commercial activities, can be utilised in delivering automation, driving better customer outcomes and experiences throughout the customer journey. By aggregating player data from various sources, compliance tech can be invaluable for operators to identify potential risks and take proactive measures to mitigate them. This comprehensive approach not only safeguards players but also protects the reputation and integrity of the iGaming operator.

Effective coordination between compliance and commercial activities is essential. Compliance technical solutions can bridge the gap between these two functions by providing real-time insights into compliance performance and player behaviour. Additionally, they offer a summary of all business activities, enabling the coordination of player protection, business risk mitigation, and marketing activities. This alignment not only ensures regulatory compliance but also enhances the overall customer experience.

Tailored Solutions, Continuous Improvement, and Regulatory Resilience

Fine-tuning the processes is one thing. Providing the operations/risk and compliance teams with an easily navigable back office and system that locks all relevant information in one place and cuts through the risks of multi-maneuvering spreadsheets, documents, tabs, and apps is something quite different – providing long-term stability and controlling the level of data interpretation and decision-making operational risks.

How about a platform actually built by compliance professionals? Industry collaboration remains that elusive aspirational subject, and yet, maybe, it is achievable via B2B providers listening to their clients’ feedback and enhancing functionalities on the basis of day-to-day use.

The right tool can make all the difference to the level of risk in delivering the expectations of a company policy – enhancing the level of ongoing oversight via personalised tools.

At Crucial Compliance, we understand challenges specific to igaming compliance operations, and we focus on providing tools designed to support making processes better and documenting their implementation easier. 

We have developed a solution that transforms inefficient workflows into streamlined compliance management. We pay attention to not only what you need to do but also how to make it sustainable and relatable. Our platform’s intuitive interface consolidates all you need in one place, providing you and your teams with a comprehensive range of reports, customer-focused segmentations, predictive models, business analytics, and marketing attribution to optimise your operational delivery, protect your customers, and your risk management program.