One might naturally assume that for all of the time and resources that casinos spend complying with their multiplicity of regulators, there would be a plethora of disruptive technologies available to help gaming compliance streamline processes and reduce costs.
That’s what Rob Willis, now CEO of Blackwrist Interactive LLC, reckoned when he started working in gaming software development a decade ago, only to realize that this wasn’t quite the case.
What he found, and still finds today, was an inefficient, informal and ad hoc approach to compliance across all verticals of casino operation: Excel spreadsheets being emailed back and forth across departments; supporting documentation being jumbled into Word, JPEG and PDF files; the guy in the cage entering his data in opposite format than the guy in IT.
“What’s left is that the poor person in compliance has to basically take these pieces and then manually put them together into one cohesive document,” Willis explained. “I’m sitting here saying, ‘You’re kidding me! We need to develop something.’”
Through conversations with compliance personnel across the industry, Willis realized that new technology to improve the these process would be a welcomed innovation.
“What they’re looking for is automation,” he emphasized. “They do these things now, but they do it at a cost. It takes extra bodies and it takes time.”
Cloud-based Compliance
All of this served as the impetus for Willis’s new product, Cennix – a cloud-based document management and compliance portal specifically designed for use by heavily-regulated industries like casino gaming.
“It’s actually usable by almost any organization that has compliance requirements. We’re starting in gaming because gaming is one of the most-regulated businesses out there,” he said.
The goal is to mitigate the internal confusion, misunderstandings and frustrations that typically arise during the compliance process, and ultimately generate cost savings in the form of process improvement, fewer man-hours devoted to compliance tasks and fewer regulatory violations.
With Cennix, compliance officers can assign out tasks directly across the enterprise through its cloud-based portal. Line managers then input data and upload supporting documentation directly into the portal, with the compliance officer receiving a notification once the task is accomplished.
“If i’m in IT, I don’t have to keep track of 200 different Word documents to support my claims, I can use Cennix for that. I don’t have to email those things to another person, who then turns around to create another Word document. The application is going to do that,” Willis said.
The software not only streamlines and automates some of these quotidian and non-value-added tasks, it gives casino compliance offers a holistic, comprehensive view of how their company is doing – in real time – with regards to all of its regulatory obligations. This information can reveal where progress is being made and which areas require more resources and effort.
To make the process even smoother, Cennix also embeds all of the pertinent jurisdictional regulations that the casino must comply with directly into the platform, meaning access to the requirements and the extent to which they are being complied with internally is quite literally at the compliance officer’s fingertips.
As a document management system, Cennix also provides a centralized location for policies and procedures that are developed for compliance purposes but all too frequently end up collecting dust.
“What happens is someone produces a policy or a procedure, they put it into a three-ring binder and it goes right onto a shelf and no one ever looks at it again,” Willis said, emphasizing that by functioning as a cloud-based repository, Cennix can help make those documents more easily accessible and updatable.
Embracing Compliance
Casinos like to embrace their existence as the country’s most “heavily-regulated industry” as a badge of honor. The moniker highlights their commitment to sound and ethical practices, and it brings trust and integrity to a business that hasn’t always had a squeaky clean public image.
The flip side is that being a heavily-regulated entity is a lot of non-value-added work. Complying with local, state and federal regulators and law enforcement bodies is an exhaustive process, and significant man-hours and resources must be devoted to avoid getting slapped with ever-increasing fines.
As casinos continue to expand beyond just gambling in their offerings to customers, the range of items on the compliance landscape continues to grow – from food safety and supply chains to worker and guest safety and Sarbanes-Oxley rules.
The most pressing, Willis reckons, is PCI – the standards applied to companies that accept credit and debit card payments. PCI compliance has become a hot issue recently as hackings and thefts of customer data at retail establishments like Target and Chipotle become more common, and compliance failings in this area can result in seven-figure fines and incalculable reputational damage.
Cennix offers a simple way to keep tabs on this ever-growing swath of regulations and risks by sending out automatic prompts to responsible parties when tasks must be updated, refreshed or re-worked.
“For PCI compliance, a network diagram should be refreshed every six months,” Willis said, giving an example. “The person who is assigned that particular task gets an email from the system saying ‘This thing is five months old has a refresh rate of six months. You have the next 4 weeks to refresh this item.'”
Just having the ability to demonstrate that sound internal controls and procedures are in place can go a long way toward appeasing regulators, he emphasized:
“If you are doing everything in PCI’s book, then they’re not going to go after you as hard. That’s just the reality.”
Audits are a Breeze
The other core component of Cennix’s utility is that it creates an auditable trail of documentation in a centralized location that can exponentially reduce headaches during audit season. This applies not just to the entities being audited, but to the auditors themselves.
The pre-audit discovery component allows auditors to share a library of requested documents with auditee ahead of time, thus giving managers a head start on producing the needed materials.
“You can put in what you’re looking for from someone you’re looking to audit. You can say ‘From IT I want to see this, from the accounting folks I want to see this,'” Willis said.
Managers can then assign out the items as tasks to pertinent employees and track their progress producing the requested materials in real time.
This built-in accountability, Willis said, is a powerful mechanism for thwarting the natural tendency of moving these types of projects to the back burner.
“So if we’ve got an audit coming in four weeks, and we’re two weeks in and nobody’s gotten anything done – that’s typical. Everyone waits until the last minute.”
As the pre-audit work is completed and uploaded into Cennix, it also gives the auditors a head start on reviewing the material.
“Even before they step on property to do the audit, they can see some of the responses and the supporting documentation,” said Willis.
—
Aaron Stanley
https://www.clippings.me/aaronstanley
mobile: 612-220-7492
