Added: August 20, 2014
The 2014 Gaming Racing and Wagering Australia conference (GRWA) was held in Sydney from August 11 to August 13. Discussions covered online and mobile gambling, including improvements in remote gambling payments. However, the most interesting information for Australian online gamblers came inadvertently during an industry keynote discussion on a regulator’s perspective on Barangaroo and the direction of legislation for gaming. Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority (IGLA) chief executive Micheil Brodie was the lead speaker.
During the course of his speech, Brodie commented that the proposals made by regulators of online and server based systems would be the next big development for pokie machines in land based casinos. He gave two reasons for this. The first was the effects of the global consolidation of the gaming and casino market. The second was the need for operators to tighten profit margins. In such a scheme no hardware other than the gaming machine itself would exist on the land casino site. All the data-centres, servers and administration would be located online at offshore locations. They would provide the software to the pokie machine in the brick and mortar casinos.
Such a scenario raises the question of whether these online driven pokies could be classified as land casino equipment. The hardware of the poker machine would be the only physical component in the land casino and the rest of the equipment like the servers would be offshore. Also the control for switching the software on and off would lie outside the casino. Would it not be incumbent to then classify the system as an online one? After all it would be just like players wagering at home on their desktops or laptops. This would pose a challenge for the current regulatory system in Australia that gives the right to the states to regulate gambling. New mechanisms would have to be devised for operators wanting to centralise operations not only nationally but also internationally.
Another interesting session was the one on improving payments in mobile and online applications by James Burnett, General Manager of Marketing and Communications, Ladbrokes. He spoke on the need to create an efficient process to pay out winnings and collecting deposits from online casino players while managing security and the risk of fraud. Mobile gaming is a growing sector in Australia and Burnett spoke on dealing with mobile money payments and the future of mobile payments. A new and uncharted concept is that of virtual currencies. Burnett explained how virtual currencies can fit into Australia’s gaming space.
