There’s a few sore heads at HooYu and across the egaming industry this morning. The team at HooYu is proud to announce that last night we won the accolade of Compliance & KYC Supplier at the eGaming Review B2B Awards that recognise the companies that power the eGaming industry.
Here’s a few thoughts on why the judges selected HooYu from over 20 suppliers to win Compliance & KYC Supplier of the Year, culled from our award entry submission:
A tough year for the industry, a breakthrough year for HooYu
2019-2020 was a tough year for the gaming industry, even before the advance of Coronavirus put a halt to sports betting markets. The last 12 months have been dominated by increased KYC regulatory pressure on gaming operators. In May 2019 the UK Gambling Commission introduced new LCCP KYC requirements and as the year progressed, operators were tasked with further requirements to better understand affordability, source of funds, source of wealth and connections to problem gambling.
At the same time, this has been a breakthrough year for HooYu where we have stood shoulder to shoulder with our clients, as together, we reacted to market challenges:
- We helped Betfred to design their new account opening process to comply with the new UKGC LCCP requirements.
- We helped many new clients who implemented our enhanced due diligence tool, HooYu Investigate to better understand their customers.
- We helped eSports betting sites such as Luckbox to follow the lead of traditional gaming operators and embrace KYC.
Setting a new compliance standard – KYC and UYC
At HooYu, we offer more than just KYC and customer onboarding. Our newest platform, HooYu Investigate, enables compliance teams to visualise a customer’s world to discover negative financial indicators, property ownership and connections to problem gamblers or financially distressed associates.
In the last 12 months, HooYu Investigate was a strong success enabling many gaming operators to uncover intelligence about their customers. We also worked closely with our clients to add new functionality and data to help them react to market challenges to really understand their customers, not just perform basic KYC on them.
As such, as we worked with both clients and regulators to react to industry challenges, we decided the time was right to coin a new term – UYC or Understand Your Customer. As the scale of the problem gambling challenge grows, and regulatory pressure increases, it became apparent that traditional KYC was not enough. Both operators and regulators are now looking to do more than just skim the surface when it comes to knowing their customers, they want to understand them.
We launched the term UYC with a piece of thought leadership in September 2019 and worked with iGaming Business on a webinar to share this research with the industry – please see on-demand webinar here.
How is HooYu making a difference to KYC compliance?
At HooYu, we recognise that gaming operators need to balance the need for robust KYC with a smooth customer experience. In the last year, HooYu Identify has rapidly become the customer onboarding platform of choice for gaming operators seeking to optimise the success of their customer onboarding funnel.
The secret sauce to how HooYu helps gaming operators to satisfy both sides of this coin is that we don’t just offer KYC tech. We also provide the UI and UX layer that sits inside the operator’s site or app to guide the customer through the KYC process so that they have a smooth, easy KYC experience and that operators can maximise sign-up conversion.
We partnered with SBC in May 2019 to deliver a webinar to share insight into how operators could meet the new LCCP requirements and still maximise the success of customer onboarding processes – please see on-demand webinar here.
Working with the industry
At HooYu we believe in working with the industry. We think it’s important to help regulators to understand the steps that operators are taking to meet the plethora of age verification, problem gambling, affordability, money laundering compliance challenges. To do this we consult closely with regulators to let them know what technology is available to the industry to help meet compliance requirements.
It’s also been a very busy year for HooYu on the gaming conference circuit. We’ve partnered with KnowNow who have emerged as the specialist provider of focussed KYC and gambling harm conferences to present to audiences in the UK, Malta and Gibraltar. We’ve also had a lot of fun along the way, hosting HooYu parties at polo clubs in Sotogrande, on board boats in Valletta harbour and by now we pretty much have a loyalty card at our favourite restaurant San Giuliano in Malta!
What are our clients saying?
Don’t take our word for it, here’s what some of our clients have said in the last 12 months:
David de la Yesa, Director of Payments and Fraud at Betfred commented, “HooYu has not only complied with all the requirements from the UK Gambling Commission they have created the best possible KYC process when customer documentation verification is required.”
Luckbox Chief Operating Officer Quentin Martin said, “From day one, we’ve made integrity, player security and doing things right among of our top priorities at Luckbox. Nowhere are these values more important than the customer onboarding process which is why we chose HooYu to help us ensure age and identity verification compliance whilst delivering smooth global customer onboarding.”
The team at HooYu would love to listen to what KYC, onboarding, UYC and affordability challenges you want us to tackle next, so please email david.pope@hooyu.com and tell us your thoughts.
