All roads lead to compliance

Nektan is a relative newcomer to the worldwide egaming industry, having only been established since 2014, launching a fully functional mobile gaming platform. Since then they have carved out a niche as one of the industry’s rising stars, offering operators across the globe in this rapidly expanding sector its casino management solution Evolve, as well as its B2B content distribution platform, E-Lite.

However in the rise to develop a new and thriving egaming business, equal attention must also be paid to compliance with regulations in all operational jurisdictions, especially in today’s increasingly strict regulatory world. Malcolm Campbell, Nektan’s head of compliance discusses the platform provider’s approach:

EGR Compliance: You allow your white label partners to operate under your UK, Gibraltar and Irish licenses, how does this work?

Malcolm Campbell (MC): Through our white label model, we have several templates that present themselves as a branded casino, and behind that we have one proprietary system that manages the whole operator experience, known as the Evolve platform. We have more than 140 branded casinos at last count but around 50 different partners contracted to them.

So, you can see straight away that an individual partner may have several casino brands and that presents itself from the front end but it’s all managed from that one proprietary back office system. From a compliance and regulatory point of view that is quite a complicated model, however we can make sure that anything that goes out to the public via any form of marketing is fully compliant and built into the actual sites. Nothing can be pushed out by our partners unless it is compliant.

We do extensive due diligence on each individual white label partner as we are going through the contracting process, making sure that they understand our positions on GDPR, marketing and advertising regulations. We can do this because we have been born into the modern egaming industry where compliance has a greater emphasis and as a result we don’t have to adapt existing strategies, just develop ones which are compliant from the outset. Our proprietary systems are very active and adaptable to any regulatory changes set out by regulators in each of our jurisdictions.

EGR Compliance: Do you have any plans to apply for other licenses in other jurisdictions in the near future?

MC: We are licensed in the UK, Gibraltar and have a tax licence in Ireland. We are now in the process of obtaining our Swedish licence and given the recent gaming tax reduction in Spain, we are also applying for a Spanish licence. From our office in Gibraltar, we can literally see Ceuta from where we are and our approach is to take advantage of those tax reductions available to us, as much as we can.

As an overall view of our business model, we received a mandate from the Board six months ago that tasked us with doing as well in other jurisdictions as we are in the UK. We have a project called internationalisation, in which we are integrating certain new languages in all of our functions including marketing, CRM, payments etc. Our overall intention is to be a regulated entity in as many jurisdictions as possible.

EGR Compliance: What processes do you use to ensure that your products are not used in jurisdictions where online gambling is restricted?

MC: The compliance and legal teams run a monthly review of our offering, using our jurisdiction matrix which gives us information such as the latest regulatory developments in any of our targeted jurisdictions, what marketing can and cannot be done, which providers are licensed etc. At the end of this process, we will probably have around six different pieces of information which are then communicated to all our partners.

We always ensure our partners are kept up-to-date with the jurisdictions we are allowed to be in and remind them of our expectations of their behaviour. This includes explicitly stating that no partner is allowed to put Nektan or any of its licenses at risk.

On top of that, we have the technical ability to restrict our partners from launching either sites or certain games in a particular jurisdiction (geoblocking). We can geoprotect either a URL or at the individual game level. It’s a two-pronged approach that relies on communication between compliance departments and our partners and having the technology to back it up. Unseen, unheard but driving everything – that’s our approach to compliance.

EGR Compliance: Much has been made over the last year about online games that are perceptibly child-friendly and encourage gambling amongst minors, what is your stance on this and how do you ensure that your games do not appeal to minors?

MC: Because of the company’s young age, we’ve been born into an environment where social responsibility is well established and therefore have always had an in-house process that is of a high standard, which starts with the compliance department.

Any game that is going to be developed is reviewed at pre-development state and we use our in-house experience in this area when dealing with the grey lines of what might attract a child. You could even say that in the compliance and development team we are all parents and we employ a sensible approach, none of us would want our children attracted to gambling.

As a company we are very sensitive to this issue, to the point that even imported third party games are included under the same compliance review process and anything that is deemed to be unsuitable is pushed back to the provider. Our approach to that is the game providers will only develop a game type that they are sure will get to market, so the more the industry pushes back on that type of approach, the more likely that the providers will develop suitable content from a regulatory perspective.

I can think of one provider who we recently spoke to where we pushed back and told them that its content was unsuitable. The game provider was naturally disappointed, but at the end of the day it is our responsibility and we take our social responsibility measures very seriously. Compliance will sit with the games management team and conduct a thorough review, which is quite an open meeting and ends with a sign-off. Our experiences of this process make sure we don’t cross any regulatory lines.

EGR Compliance: Responsible gambling is the industry’s topic-du-jour, what does Nektan do to ensure that its games are played and operated responsibly, and do you plan to introduce any responsible gambling elements to your existing portfolio of games in the future?

MC: We have a culture of social responsibility, which is an area of constant focus for me and the company at large. I have experienced first hand what happens when a gaming company gets it wrong and that has coloured my approach to social responsibility.

Taking a step back from my role, I’m very proud of the fact that everyone at Nektan has bought into the social responsibility culture, from lower levels right up to Board level. That then reflects into how we approach not only our games but those of our partners.

For example, we recently switched off a game provider completely because they were unable to send us an API with the latest RTS direction on the ability to have in-game messaging making it clear to players when they are playing with bonuses rather than cash.

We have a set approach where any game that gets developed, or any game which is offered through the Nektan licence is compliant with all of our regulatory requirements, not just the UKGC. Where there is a separation into the Gibraltar licensing, we capture that.

That will continue as we expand both into Sweden and Spain. There will be small differences again but because of Nektan’s proprietary platform and our back office that is completely open to API plug-ins, we expect that our own games and those of our partners should be quickly updated with any additional requirements.