At G2E Asia, as operators were looking for the innovations that could propel them forward, Floyd Risk Advisory’s Benjamin Floyd cautioned everyone to get their compliance in order before going too far. To learn more about what operators need to do, Stephanie Tower caught up with him on the sidelines.
In his panel, Floyd emphasized Customer Due Diligence and Know Y our Customer (KYC) processes. He hammered home these items with tower, as their vital to combatting money laundering and financial terrorism.”Anti-money laundering and financial crime is an increasing area of risk and regulatory focus in the industry,” he said. “We provide advisory services relating to financial crime and anti-money laundering.”
While new payment options can offer great advantages, getting these basic compliance steps right is important to keeping the world safe. “Customer due diligence and knowing your customers really is key in this area, because you know transaction monitoring is very important and understanding your risk, so as payment innovation unfolds, if you will, and new payment types are developed, it’s really critical that you understand and know how those payments work, and who the customers are behind them,” Floyd said. “So the more you eliminate anonymity and the payment chain the more you can reduce your risk and lower your risk.”
Tower asked Floyd to share some best practices, and he had a whole list ready. “Being able to know your customer, monitor those transactions, in some cases, it’s really ensuring that you understand the source of the funds,” he said. “If it’s a mobile wallet type product, understanding how the money is being loaded onto that product and from what sources. Understanding that and what the controls are is important.”
Overall, Floyd sees the gambling industry as trying to do its part in meeting regulations head on. “Really globally, the industry continues to adapt to regulatory requirements in this space specifically, in AML,” he said. “I think that the industry is evolving and continues to try to comply and try to ensure that it really knows its customer and is making use of all the information that it has, to the casino to ensure that keeping the bad actors out of the business. You know, it’s challenging, and compliance culture is critical to being able to do this well. but it’s still an evolution. I think we’ll continue to see that into 2020, hopefully you’ll see fewer and fewer missteps, but we continue to see those in other industries as well.”
As the industry tries to stay on the good side of regulators, Floyd offered up some final words of advice going forward. “Having a good compliance culture, being focused on doing the right, having strong oversight and support from your senior leadership and your board of directors, and then that will flow down through the organization to make sure that the organization is doing the right thing,” he said. “And we can do better by proactively evaluating, how much in terms of resources do I need to make sure that we’re doing the right thing, knowing our customers, monitoring customer behavior is important, and the right level of technology resources.”
