How Automation Technology Can Streamline iGaming AML and RG Protocols with Flows

Creating a safer and more sustainable online environment for your customer is crucial to maintaining a successful long-term business. Our Director of Sales Domenico Mazzola, talks to iGamingFuture about the importance of automation technology and how it can help you to streamline AML and RG Protocols.

Given the recent industry focus on iGaming companies enhancing their anti-money laundering (AML) and responsible gambling (RG) protocols, there’s no room for operators to start getting complacent. While in the past, tightening all these checks and balances would have been a huge undertaking that required thousands of hours of manual labour, these days, the introduction of automation technology like Flows can certainly make things easier while also providing a safer experience for the customer.

As any successful iGaming operator will know, creating a safer and more sustainable online environment for your customer is absolutely crucial to maintaining a successful long-term business. By quickly identifying and reducing the instances of harmful betting behaviour by strengthening your responsible gambling (RG) controls, you’re not only able to protect your at-risk players but also prolong the lifecycle of customers at your site by ensuring they only ever gamble within their means.

But how exactly do operators go about doing this? Well, in the past, manually implementing key controls such as Know Your Customer (KYC) checks and RG safeguards like time limits and voluntary self-exclusion have certainly helped to combat money laundering and problem gambling, respectively, but both have come at a considerable cost to company resources. With these processes having to be initiated and checked against potentially thousands of customers, responsible gambling teams have had to spend a great many man-hours ensuring that players are protected and their sites are compliant.

Thankfully, the recent introduction of automation technology via no-code integration and automation platforms such as Flows has enabled operators to not just maintain, but improve on these high standards of player safety, while at the same time reducing the need for manual input. By integrating a system like Flows into their RG and AML processes, an operator can build and deploy custom workflows that take away the bulk of the heavy lifting by automating messaging and sharing the very latest data with other teams in real-time.

By automating processes such as KYC verification, AML protocol and RG enforcement, operators can reduce the potential for human error and ensure that no one falls through the cracks, while also boosting the efficiency of their controls to free up the valuable time teams need to intervene at the crucial moment. This can not only give operators peace of mind that their offering remains compliant with the latest regulations – thereby reducing the risk of fines and other penalties – but also help them take better care of their customers and enable them to act decisively when a potential problem arises.

Let’s take an example whereby a customer has elected to set themselves a deposit limit and subsequently attempted to add money to their account beyond this restriction. By using an automation platform, operators can create a workflow that will not only decline the deposit but also use the attempt as a live trigger to send a warning message to the RG team. In the case of Flows – which is a fully agnostic platform – they could even integrate third-party software into their workflow, allowing the message to be sent via a program like Slack and the data to be stored on a Google Sheet.

Of course, in the past acquiring this data and manually sending a message to the RG team might have taken up to 24 hours, meaning the information is already old and the opportunity to intervene may have passed. Now, however, all of this can be triggered automatically from a workflow, allowing the RG team to take immediate action and potentially prevent a more serious incident. This in turn prevents the risk of breaching compliance standards and ensures that the customer is better protected.

The other major benefit of an operator automating their RG and AML processes is that it enables them to handle a higher volume of customers while at the same time ensuring that nothing gets missed. As there’s potentially no limit to the level of customisation they can apply to their workflows, virtually any parameter can be used as a trigger and any required action can be subsequently initiated. This can be particularly useful during a data-collection process like KYC, as indicators of suspicious activity such as money laundering can be automatically flagged and alerts can be sent to relevant teams accordingly.

While we’ve touched on a couple of the ways in which automation platforms like Flows can help operators streamline their RG and AML processes, this really is just scratching the surface of what this innovative and intuitive technology is capable of. By setting up custom workflows that monitor and react to pre-set cues, operators can greatly alleviate the burden placed on their teams, equip them with the most up-to-date data and give them the resource to react in real-time – thereby ensuring they can keep pace with regulations and create a safer, more sustainable environment for their customers.

First published in iGaming Futures.