Can you give us a quick overview of your product?
OCR Labs Global is a fully automated ID verification solution built from proprietary technology. We have our own proprietary tech and facial biometrics, as well as all the technical elements needed to capture documents and automate processes. We are the only fully automated engine in the world and there has been quite a race for ID verification providers, where they are heavily reliant on when you try to automate as much of the journey as you can through technology. Then it falls over into an aged model, so your ID doc would not make it through the automation and would go to some humans that work in a call centre. Our engine is vastly different; we automate the journey, which makes what we do very efficient, very fast and very accurate. Obviously in the world of iGaming, where they are trying to make the player journey as efficient as possible, it has quite a number of benefits to the technology we offer.
For an iGaming company, where would your product see the best implementation?
There’s a number of different user cases. Normally when an iGaming company is doing KYC, they would do it via data because it’s frictionless. When they get to a point where they have deposited a certain level of money, or they need to do a withdrawal, or they are depositing through a crypto agency, they would ask for document verification as a trigger. They want the journey for the player to be as frictionless as possible. In most cases for European operators, they would use document verification at reauthentication. We are working with several operators in different Asian markets, especially in grey markets, where the player might be quite aware they are playing in a market that isn’t regulated by the government. Therefore, they might want to offer their KYC documents at the beginning to feel more secure in the relationship with the operator.
In those cases, they like to do it up front; and it can be argued that the technology now has come on so quickly with facial biometrics that you just need to take a picture, smile, upload the documents and the process is done in five seconds. There is not the friction that there was in the player journey and, if you are doing ID Verification fully at the frontend, you reduce fraud quite heavily. Over time, our user model might move more to the frontend because the technology has progressed. Another user case for us is linked to our name; we started life focusing on OCR, which is where text is lifted from a digital image. With the rise in responsible gaming and the pressure on operators now to have to review documents like payslips, proof of address and bank statements, when I go into meetings at the moment, they all want to talk about our OCR capabilities.
It wasn’t one I thought would be there, but that is a problem they’ve got at the moment. The manual process around document review, because of the weight that’s on them now to have to do manual review of documents linked to responsible gaming, that’s a real big area for us – one we’re looking at doing more around; because we think we have the tech that makes us different to any other supplier in the market. Imagine going further than just lifting data off a bank statement, imagine you could look at it and see which other operators that customer has spent money with, whether that person has payday loans, if their wages are not coming in via an employer, if they are coming in from the Department of Work and Pensions. There are lots of triggers we can automate to learn, rather than having a team of human beings to have to manually review those documents.
Do you do better in regulated markets?
Yes, obviously there is a lot of activity around the UK licenses, Gibraltar, Sweden, the more heavily regulated markets. But then equally there are responsible gaming measures in all markets. It is just the degree of them. Companies increasingly want a seamless service for customer interaction, because the easier the service the more retention on the back end.
With any process that requires human intervention there are errors. For the gambling industry, which is a technical industry, the heavier the regulations the more human beings are having to get involved to monitor and manage what’s going on. So there will be more automation of a lot of these heavily regulated processes that are coming in. It’s our job as a digital ID technology provider to try and take away some of the pressure of manual intervention, which will encompass errors and costly teams. I was in one organisation the other day, and they had thousands of individuals doing manual intervention. But there are huge costs and pressures that these operators are currently under, what with the amount of ID documents being reviewed and source of funds documents they are currently having to go through.
How are you targeting expansion for what you offer in the gaming industry?
We are a global organisation, and we have 16,000+ ID documents we can cover. As an organisation, we have cut our teeth in APAC, and that’s where we can boast that we have many leading banks using our services. So, if you are from the APAC region, you are going to know who CR Labs are. I have been here for five weeks and I’m one of the new wave of international expansion. The reason I came here was because I looked at the tech and I saw it was vastly different to anything else on the market.
Although people in Europe will say we haven’t heard of you guys before, we have been around for a long time. Now we’re ready for international expansion and we’ve got a proven product that’s scalable no matter the market. We have conversations about markets such as Japan all the time because it’s a market that some operators are having challenges with; but we can cover those documents easily. Brand recognition is becoming more important, as you push into more markets.
We have been very particular about the team we have put together; we’ve got Adam Desmond, ex-Mitek and GBG, and I was head of AML at Acuris Risk Intelligence. So, we are bringing together a team of individuals that are quite well known in the industry, within the space we offer. We want to go in and have those conversations with operators at the right level; we’re not playing a scattergun approach, we know we have something here that’s quite special.
But our biggest challenge right now is that not many people know who we are in the UK and US. That’s why we are at the trade shows, we’re doing lots of press, lots of PR, lots of interviews, because we just need to be vocal about what is different and special about what we have. There has been a race for all ID verification companies to find a solution that’s automated. We are the only company in the market that have our own proprietary tech, every element of what we do is our own proprietary technology – which has allowed us to be able to automate and come to market with this product that’s different to anybody else.
How do you ensure data protection across the products you offer?
Well, we’re a data processor, so we pass the data to an operator. Our security systems are designed to meet or exceed industry standards. We just push the data in and out; we’re not holding it.
