European Gaming / Q&A – Queen’s Award for Innovation Danny Edwards, Chief Revenue Officer at Synalogik

• Congratulations on receiving the Queen’s Award for Innovation. Can you tell us more about the award and why you received it?

The Queen’s Awards for Enterprise are probably the top, and most prestigious, awards programme in the UK. There are several categories, in our case we won the Queen’s Award for Innovation.

We won the award due to our data aggregation platform, Scout®, and its contribution to fighting financial crime and helping organisations with regulatory compliance across both the public and private sector. Scout® has proven to deliver significant ROI for businesses across the gambling, insurance, banking, legal and public sector. In the gambling sector our clients include Entain Plc, Betway and Buzz Bingo.

• What does receiving such an award mean to Synalogik and the team behind the business?

Along our journey we have been extremely lucky to get the support of some large multinationals and high-profile investors; however, receiving the Queen’s Award for Innovation has galvanised and given confidence to our team in different, in some ways more important, ways. We have always been driven by the desire to help and serve the wider public interest; therefore, to receive an independent award of this high calibre gives us an unmatched sense of pride that we are delivering on our mission.

With the sad news of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s passing, it is with deep regret, but great pride that we realise we are now going to be the last company to ever receive HRH Queen Elizabeth’s Award for Innovation.

• What makes your Scout data aggregation platform so effective?

Scout® is unique in its capability to aggregate data from open, closed, third party and proprietary sources, allowing investigators and analysts to query data efficiently and at scale. Scout® performs data collection in a fraction of the time it takes for users to manually log in and out of multiple data sources and investigation tools, even when looking at thousands of investigation points. Countless testing indicates Scout® saves up to 85% of their time compared to manual investigations.

This ability to aggregate all these data sources means that it is capable of automating complex enhanced due diligence checks and fraud investigations something that had not been possible before. Scout®, through saving time, enables your team to investigate more cases, in greater detail, at a lower cost; however, it’s benefits go beyond just time-consumption. It also improves the effectiveness of investigations by eliminating the human error and inconsistency that occurs when trying to compile reports and find links across information available in different browser windows and formats.

Synalogik was created in 2018 by experts from law enforcement, intelligence, and legal backgrounds, who were frustrated by the amount of time it was taking to pull together information when performing investigations manually. We therefore designed Scout® to include tools that would fundamentally address each of the pain points we had with the investigation process.  Besides wanting to create a single intelligence environment with a unified interface, we added automated report generation in numerous formats, the ability to visualise links between entities, the ability to clash data and do bulk uploads, an open source intelligence tool, risk and search workflows as well as the ability to break down data sharing barriers between branches and sub-brands with the Synalogik Knowledgebase.

• It is now used by 25% of the gambling industry – how does it benefit operators and what upsides does it enable them to unlock?

Scout helps operators to enhance their EDD, AML, and RG processes by combining their third-party data with open-source information (including adverse media). This means that their analysts only need to log into one platform to perform all the required checks, which is then displayed in a downloadable report and in the workbench within Scout.

We have seen from existing customers that the time taken to perform an investigation has reduced by as much as 85%, which is then allowing their analysts to focus on other business-critical tasks.

• Just how important is it for operators to meet the highest possible standards when it comes to affordability, AML, etc?

It’s incredibly important. As we’ve seen recently the UKGC are handing more fines out than ever to operators for failures, particularly around AML and social responsibility. I think operators understand that they are part of an ecosystem where it benefits everyone to ensure that laundered money is kept out of their businesses and that players can play in a fun way that is sustainable for their future and the future of organisations.

• How can operators prepare for any tightening of regulations in markets such as the UK? How can your platform help with this?

Tightening regulations inevitably mean that operators need to get better at spotting possible signs of criminals trying to launder money and players hiding their true financial situation. It is crucial therefore to learn more about the possible sources of data available and the insights they can give into the challenges mentioned above.

Open-source intelligence is now a mandated and key source of information for operators. Synalogik has carried out extensive research around identifying and risk assessing vulnerable individuals. In one such case found on the surface an individual who appeared to have no apparent vulnerabilities, however, through investigating more OSINT data sources, we were able to find mentions of his gambling addiction on several forums. If we had only used a limited number of data sources, this would have been missed, creating the potential for harm to the player and the operator.

Our platform is the only one that takes a data agnostic approach to aggregation of data, meaning we work with our operator clients to integrate the data sources they need to complete their risk assessments and checks to the optimal thoroughness. Being able to automate search and risk assessments over all their data sources gives them the time and tools to investigate more cases, in more detail.

In addition, it helps to improve analyst decisions – manually cross referencing and collating data from multiple datasets in different browser windows can easily lead to human error. Scout® creates standardised, in-depth, and clear reports, leaving operators and their teams free to focus on decision making.

Scout® open-source intelligence tool enables operators to create highly targeted automated searches around keywords, proximity, timeframe, and document type, eliminating false positives, and getting them to the right information in seconds.