Andrew Cardno asked those gathered at an Indian Gaming Association Tradeshow & Conference session last week to think back 20 years and remember what tribal casinos looked like. Many of them, he recalled, looked like skating rinks, semi-permanent buildings with slot machines, sometime inflatable structures that were relics of era when bingo halls reigned.
Cardno, CTO and co-founder of Quick Custom Intelligence, then flashed forward to a recent visit to a small facility in Washington state. He said the hotel was “beautiful, with kayaking outside. I was so busying looking around, I couldn’t find the casino,” he said during the IGA session From Observation to Risk Intelligence: Modernizing Casino Security and Surveillance Through Data Integration. “We’re no longer a casino business, but a resort business, and security is no longer about the casino. It’s about the whole resort.”
Security is an ongoing, and at times overwhelming responsibility for operators. Malcolm Rutherford, Executive Vice President of Strategic Operations at eConnect, said it’s no longer good enough to concentrate solely on the security of casino operations.
“Are you doing a fresh analysis on this? Is this more of a fraud case? Are you looking at gaming?” Rutherford asked. “Are you looking at point of sale, food, beverage, to look for evidence of fraud. Because if you’re not looking at those things, you might say, ‘I don’t see a day’s worth of data in each single data point. I need to look at patterns and examine data. These are areas where larger data sets and better analytical tools are required.”
Rutherford noted that one way to mitigate threats is through open-source intelligence, where social media accounts are scanned to keep track of what people are saying about properties and potential problems can be looked at. But the problem with open-source intelligence is that people are needed to conduct it.
“It’s very important when you can do it and if you have the resources that you can dedicate to it,” Rutherford said. “But because some of these operations are very small, who’s going to be doing all these jobs?
“How many people wear multiple hats? Well, they just have the one job. It’s `I’m just going to do open-source intelligence, and that’s what I’ve got to do.’ If you don’t have those kind of capabilities, they’re relatively easy to get. The problem is everyone’s running around doing other stuff. You tend to run out of people.”
Cardno said it’s important to for customers to know that security is of paramount importance to an operator. It’s not unusual to find properties promoting their security operations. “This becomes an essential part of who you are, even to the point of putting security people on your billboards.”
But Cardno stressed that it’s also important to realize that there will be incidents, even in the most security-conscious casinos. He’s familiar with the issues that can arise, because he became involved in one when his nephew brought a six-foot rubber sword to a casino. When Cardno arrived, security personnel were everywhere. Cardno knew the casino owner and was able to talk to him, even as he admitted, “This was not fun. It was a very serious situation, but you’ve got to think about damage control,” Cardno said. “There’s going to be an incident. How do you handle it? How do you get ahead of it? You don’t want to say in your media, for example, we never have incidents. We have one, right? You can’t control when the thing happens, right?
“If security is one of the primary drivers of visitation and one of the primary drivers of choice, then how are you communicating that to your customers? I need to communicate with my customers about my security practices.”
