International Casino Review spoke with Tom Nieman, JCM’s VP of Global Marketing, about the AML features offered by the company’s new Fuzion technology and the prospects for the Asia-Pacific market.
ICR: Which products are JCM highlighting for the APAC market at this year’s G2E Asia?
Tom Nieman: Well of course we always have our core validation and transaction printing products, the iVizion bill validator and the Gen5 printer, they’re doing great in Asia. The promotional print capability of Gen5 has a high level of traction and it continues to break barriers and push the envelope.
However, what’s really drawn significant interest this year is our new technology, which enables currency exchange with rates that can be either preset or real-time, along with a host of other functionality.
ICR: Have you introduced the Fuzion into the Asian market?
TN: We’re just presenting at the show this year it but already there’s a great deal of interest. Bringing Fuzion to market requires a lot of collaboration with the back-end CMS providers and so we’re working closely with them.
As part of that process it’s also good to have feedback from an operator as the third critical stakeholder saying ‘this is something I want to accomplish’ - that helps a great deal.
From a regulatory standpoint, in the US we have been working with GLI but we’re not ready to submit yet for the Asian market. We’ll be there soon, we’re excited and so are the operators.
ICR: Could you tell us more about Fuzion’s capabilities in terms of AML compliance?
TN: Fuzion has a very strong AML element to it, and that’s something that has generated interest in markets worldwide, and speaks back to JCM’s core competencies of increasing security.
Customers love the idea that you’ll be able to do optical character reading off the serial numbers and generate automatic real-time reports.
When we grab those serial numbers, there’s a couple different things you can do. You can detect money laundering, for example if a patron puts in a large amount of money, plays once or twice, only puts very little of it at risk, and then decides to cash out, you can configure Fuzion to send an alert.
If you’ve got a transaction that’s suspect, you can pull-up the serial numbers and check them against a blacklist database of currency that’s been derived from criminal activities or used to finance terrorism.
Those are things that have never been really available to the casino industry, those are all elements which we’ve carried over from what we’ve learned and refined on the banking side of our business.
ICR: The casino industry in Asia is picking up pace with a number new developments in country’s like Vietnam and Cambodia. What’s your view on this?
TN: It’s region-wide, Asia can boast not only of the largest gaming jurisdiction in the world, Macau, but it can also boast it’s offering the greatest new expansion opportunities in the world.
When you look at all of south-east Asia or Japan, those countries all represent just truly terrific opportunities for gaming. So we want to continue to develop JCM’s presence here and expand it even further.
