Synalogik helps Betway reduce open source search time by a factor of 10x
The challenge before Scout®
With increasingly stringent enforcement of compliance regulations around AML and player affordability from The Gambling Commission and FCA, gaming and gambling operators are finding the cost of manually carrying out enhanced due diligence checks to stay compliant an unsustainable financial burden.
The recommendation to use open-source data has been added to guidelines for AML checks by the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), and has been mandated by the Gambling Commission with regard to affordability and AML checks; however, open source intelligence doesn’t come without issues. Without the capability to filter accurately it can return too many results, while relying on adverse media from national newspapers and the search engine in your browser could, in the former case, miss valuable information, and in the latter, return results slanted towards your browsing habits.
Betway’s open-source process was completely manual and could take up to 2 hours per customer depending on the amount of information found. Speed and accuracy challenges for Betway when trying to carry out open-source enhanced due diligence were compounded by the international nature of their business, necessitating the need to carry out search in different languages and from their respective search engines.
How Synalogik helped
Betway turned to Synalogik and their data aggregation and automation platform Scout®. Scout® enables organisations to automate enhanced due diligence – in the case of gambling operators enhanced player profiling checks – across open, closed, third party and proprietary sources, saving up to 85% of their time compared to manual investigations. Scout® includes an open source tool that uses the Google and Bing APIs to gather results avoiding your advertising preferences, it has advanced filters for proximity and any number of keywords – and it translates keywords for the appropriate local search engine.
Synalogik’s platform Scout® allowed Betway to setup automated search workflows to match their enhanced due diligence needs and to tailor the search for each region that they work in. The result was a massive reduction in open-source search times, going from 2 hours to 5-10 mins maximum to gather the information, freeing up time to analyse and interpret the search findings and make an effective decision on how to progress with their investigation.
Reference: Simon Kent, Customer Relationship Manager, Betway Group