Age Verification and Beyond for Online Gambling

Melissa UK Team | eIDV, Identity Resolution, Machine Learning, United Kingdom

Online gambling today

Online gambling or as the new phase given, now being called “gaming” has had an overtake approach to young adults. As we see that these addictive mobile apps are drawing “punters” in for their weekly or even daily fix of sports betting. A report shows that these savvy and quite addictive sports betting apps are taking control of many individuals. This have resulted in a soaring £15 billion dollar industry, some lucky ones would consider it another source of income, at the high risk of losing it all.

In my experience being able to register and open an account is quite an effortless and simple process, just your personal details and your choice of card for payment. Not to say someone who is the under the age of 18 could provide a fake date of birth. At that age who wouldn’t.

Since the rise of the digital age, the internet has become more and more accessible for minors. Reports state that almost 82% of children between the ages of 10 and 17 have access to the internet. As mentioned above gaming and gambling now resemble the same texture, subsequently exposing “minors” to the attractive “easy money” slogans & fancy colourful marketing display. The UKs gambling commission highlighted an alarming figure, which of the number of children participating on these betting platforms has reached a skyrocketing figure of 400,000. Majority of this is believed to be children under the age of 16.

Are parents to blame for this outcome? The amount of transparency that’s gifted on today’s smartphones and its marketplace for apps, it’s hard to keep track on what your children could be doing behind their 4 digit pass code… none the less, there a have been implementations made by gambling organisations to decrease the servery of the above issue.

As we know being over the age of 18 to gamble online is a must, all betting apps must abide by compliance having an age verification system in place, prompting customers to verify their identity until they can withdraw their funds.

Age Verification allows an organisation to:

  • Confirm and validate a person’s Identity
  • Check that the person is of legal age to gamble
  • Abide by the compliance standards set by law
  • Prevent relevant content from being seen by persons underage

Age Verification & Biometric Scanning – The perfect combo

Employing the above metrics of age verification, depending on their nature, is very much sufficient enough for almost every organisation’s compliance needs, but as we are seeing a more lucrative and demanding process changing within the jurisdiction of the gambling industry, an additional layer of security has been seen to complete a further authentication method.

From a gambling scenario, the identity of a person is established in the second stage of opening an account, while still being able to actually explore around, the user cannot perform any gambling activities until the verification process is complete, which entails the submission of 3 documents, your passport, drivers’ licence and usually a proof of address. While the feature embedded on the platforms is to identity the persons age, there is no issue with the inner validity of the person in question, which only age verification will enable the suitability, and also risk of an individual to perform activities on the platform with potentially stolen documents.

This rapid ever changing industry needs more than just age verification, ideally suited to be employed within the final stages of the whole identity authentication process… but what’s missing is the initial metric to characterise and automatically recognise ones live identity through different alternations, effectively hitting all points of the “know your customer” phase. Foreseeing the current inclination of uploading your documents and having ones “KYC” information extracted & parameters compared against each other for a vital match. With many issues arising in the world of gambling, not to say just underage access, some providers are now ensuring a further step to security by implanting biometric verification. A solution that endeavours artificial technology and machine learning to verify a person though a selfie upload. This adds another stage to the whole KYC verification process, being able to scan ones primary ID document to extract crucial information, but additionally use the power of biometric facial recognition to compare the picture of the document with the persons selfie upload to verify a person in real time for a more secure “vital match”. The further fraud mitigation brings forward a positive match between the two evolving images, one from the ID document and the other and one provided in real-time.

Taking it one step further

Over the coming time, digital identity verification has dramatically improved, enabling the detection of   human presence has qualified organisations from all different sectors to meet the demanding requirements of their industry compliance.

This detection of human-presence is ensured by Melissa’s Identity Solution. A solution that brings forward the entire KYC process of real time Facial Character Verification & Age Verification.  Spoofing fraud attacks are becoming more common in today’s world, scammers have become just as savvy as our compliance reliant software solutions, video playback, 2D images and realistic facial masks are a few ways that fraudsters have used to access documents, company data and high profile accounts. In order to control the arising issue of underage gambling and combat fraud on a much greater scale, gambling platforms must look to advocating more modern Identity verification solutions.

Facial Biometrics and Liveness check allows an organisation to:

  • Capture and extract crucial data from over 2000 ID documents
  • Implement AI powered facial recognition to identity comparisons between the stored image and live image
  • Liveness check to confirm that the person is real and not a static image, checks for eye movement and proof of life.

As mentioned above, the techniques incorporated into the more modern solutions of biometric and liveness detection checks run off AI powered machine learning for an accurate 3D analysis of a person’s face. This is what Melissa can deliver via its proof of live check, accruing eye movement, legitimate presence of the person and detection of any facial spoofing.

In summary

The gambling industry has soared in the new ages of digital transparency, the lucrative sector seeing its figures almost triple past decade. As this type of leisure brings an addictive nature of a quick fix to instant earnings, the growing number of young users it attracts will continuously cause social disturbance and displacement within the commission’s placements.

In order to control the amount rising issues of underage minors and evolving fraudulent attempts, online sport betting, casinos and other platforms need to look towards innovation and employ right identity verification solutions to enable a safe, controlled & compliant friendly process.

Melissa UK nominated for the Anti-Fraud Solution Award

Melissa UK Team | Awards and Recognition, Identity Resolution, Machine Learning

Payment Awards Short list blog final

Melissa UK has been shortlisted to win the prestigious award of Anti-Fraud Solution of the year, held by the Payments Awards.

We are very honoured to be shortlisted as finalists amongst our competition. Thank you to the panel at Payment Awards for including Melissa in the selection. The full list of finalists can be seen here

The winner will be announced on the 13th of November 2019 at the Awards Gala Dinner held at London Marriot Hotel, Grosvenor Square. London

This will mark the seventeenth year that the Payment Awards will celebrate and recognise companies which have demonstrated excellence and innovating in the payments space.

The nomination of this award comes at perfect time as Melissa look to further innovate our Identity and anti-fraud solution’s.

Competitive Advantage

Melissa provides deep entity resolution to verify identities worldwide with capabilities to all countries and billions of people. We make sure of a seamless on-boarding experience while needing all anti fraudulent and compliance needs

 

Melissa Unlocks Insight and Revenue with Breakthrough AI Tools for Clinics and Research Centers

Author | Clinical Data Quality, Healthcare Data Management, Machine Learning, Machine Reasoning, Melissa Informatics, News & Events, Press Release, Product Launch | , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Cutting Edge Data Quality Transforms Real-World Clinical Data into a Future-Proofed, Research-Ready Data Goldmine for Better Patient Care

Melissa, a leading provider of global contact data quality and identity verification solutions, today announced advanced artificial intelligence (AI) solutions that combine machine reasoning, natural language processing, and machine learning to tackle one of healthcare’s biggest problems: the time and cost of data harmonization and integration.

Hospitals, clinical care, and clinical research organizations are sitting on a veritable data goldmine, based on data gathered for years from electronic medical records (EMR), electronic health records (EHR), and laboratory information management systems (LIMS). While this real-world clinical data is unusually valuable, it is also unusually complex and diverse. Melissa Informatics’ Sentient (MIS) solution is a new and unique set of clinical data quality and integration tools that quickly and easily turn diverse, dirty, and disconnected data into a clean, research-ready data resource. Melissa Informatics has laid out the company’s easy-to-follow steps to turn clinical data into a future-proofed, AI-enabled “knowledgebase” in its newest paper, “The Six-Step Guide to Turn Clinical Data into Gold,” downloadable here.

“Too often, clinical data is expensively gathered and under-valued,” said Bob Stanley, senior director, customer projects, Melissa Informatics. “When you apply machine learning and machine reasoning to access, curate, and integrate this data, it becomes ready for rewarding new uses in patient care, precision medicine research, intellectual property, and unexpected new revenue.”

Melissa Informatics further demonstrates the value of AI-enabled data quality by providing real-world use cases from world-renowned clinics including Parkinson’s Institute and Clinical Center (PICC) and PROOF Centre.

Using Melissa Informatics MIS technology, PICC transformed data such as unstructured text, XML, tables, tsv, image content and other data formats into a research quality, well-managed data resource. This helped the organization meet its technical goals including creating a new, unified “Parkinson’s Insight” data resource – as well as its business goals, including researching and publishing discoveries from that data, and engaging in revenue-generating partnerships based on the new data resource. Access the full case study here.

PROOF Centre used MIS tools to better understand and model connections between desired data sources, working under PIPEDA, HIPAA, Safe Harbor and EMEA requirements for handling of confidential patient data. MIS enabled a global platform for integrated search and reporting, analytics, and knowledge creation and sharing. This project integrated diseases, treatments, outcomes, tissue bank information, laboratory data, molecular data from blood (gene expression, proteins, metabolites), and published data. Access the full case study here.