Veridocs Inc, a company providing access to software for security-related functions including player identity validation by casinos, says it is targeting growing gaming markets in Asia for expansion of its own sales.
The U.S.-based firm offers automated identity and age checks on casinos’ potential customers via a document reader and accompanying software. The technology is designed to work with a casino’s existing information technology.
Veridocs also provides services including: watch list management, to check if an individual has been placed on any watch list for any reason; anti-money laundering and multiple transaction log screening; and on-demand access to the latest alert lists.
Veridocs already has a presence in Asia. It provides services to several casinos in Macau that have U.S.-based parent companies. U.S.-based firms and their units risk financial and other penalties if the fail to comply with U.S. regulations such as the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
“The main use in Macau for our technology is not so much age verification. It’s more for watch list checking and anti-money laundering,” said Joe Oprosko (pictured right), president and chief operating officer of Veridocs. He was speaking to GGRAsia during the Macao Gaming Show 2015 at the Venetian Macao.
“Our natural migration to Macau came with our [casino] customers. Because they had bases in the U.S. and had subsidiaries here in Macau,” the executive added.
“In terms of the development stage [casino] markets there’s Vietnam, South Korea – those are the sort of markets where I see our growth,” Mr Oprosko said.
“I think in Asia the Philippines would also be a big target market,” added the COO. The company has already supplied its technology to Best Sunshine International Ltd’s casino operation in Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. Commonwealth in the Pacific Ocean region, said Jackie Suan (pictured left), Veridocs’ director of business development.
Subscription service
Veridocs offers its software systems on a subscription basis to clients with a particular need to know more about a customer. That can range from relatively straightforward age verification – a common requirement for nightclubs, bars selling alcohol, gambling halls and any other venues barred to minors – to deeper checks typically required of players presenting themselves at the casino cage or casino player membership desk.
The Veridocs ID Authentication system starts the validation process by capturing all data from all machine-readable zones on a government-issued identity document.
The company says that unlike most data-capture products, the Veridocs system retrieves data from all readable components on the identity document including the magnetic stripe, the two-dimensional barcode, and all text that can be read by optical character recognition or ‘OCR’. The latter is a technology that enables a company or agency to convert different types of documents, such as scanned paper documents, PDF files or images captured by a digital camera into editable data that can be searched for via a computer.
“Validation involves reading the document from an OCR perspective, and comparing it to what we are pulling off the machine readable zones – the mag[netic] stripe, the barcode, that kind of stuff,” explained Mr Oprosko.
“So if someone is going to change the document, they are going to have to change the birth date and change the name. If the two sets of data are different, we flag it and say ‘Hey, this is a fail. It needs looking at more closely’,” he added.
‘The last piece of it [document verification] is the authentication. That’s where we start to look at things like all the holograms on documents… [and] how does it look under ultraviolet light?”
Mr Oprosko added: “The price structure obviously depends on the level of checks required. Some customers – say a nightclub – may just need to read the barcode on the document and check the age, whereas at the casino cage, they may want the full authentication, so that they fully understand who is standing in front of them, and who just gave them that identity document.”
