Client

Grosvenor Casinos is the UK's number one casino business. It operates casinos under the Grosvenor and G Casinos brands in England and Wales and also operates two casinos in Belgium.

Grosvenor Casinos is part of the Rank Group plc, a leading European gaming business. The group's principal activities are the operation of bingo clubs and casinos in the UK, with complementary online gaming and bookmaking services. Rank employs more than 8,000 people across more than 140 gaming operations.

The group serves in excess of two million customers per year and operates in the UK, Belgium and Spain. The social impact of Rank's business activities is significant. As a result, it takes its responsibilities to its customers, its people and to the broader communities within which Rank operates seriously.

Challenge

In 2004, Rank began to create a Responsible Gambling Policy that would apply across the whole Group. The policy supports the following three guiding principles of the Gambling Act 2005:

• To prevent gambling from being a source of crime or disorder, being associated with crime or disorder or being used to support crime
• To ensure that gambling is conducted in a fair and open way.
• To protect children and other vulnerable persons from being harmed or exploited by gambling.

In addition to this, the third Money Laundering Directive came into effect in December 2007 with the aim of increasing the prevention of money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism.

Grosvenor Casinos operates a sophisticated system of screening and intelligence gathering to keep crime out of gambling. Customers are required to show a proof of identity (usually a document issued by a Government department e.g. a valid passport or driving licence) in order to gain access to any casino gaming area.

Where this proof of identity is not available, the Gambling Act states that a customer's identity must now be verified through information received from a reliable and independent third party.

Solution

Experian provides Grosvenor Casinos with its online Authenticate service, enabling them to validate the identity of customers at the casino door in real-time, with no need for paperbased proofs. The Authenticate service matches the data given by an individual, at point of casino entry, to Experian's authoritative data sources giving a confidence level of the customer's identity being valid.

Utilising Experian for authentication searches gives Grosvenor Casinos access to the largest and most accurate consumer database in the UK ensuring a trouble-free entry for more customers without a proof of identity.

Experian's Authenticate service is fully compliant with the Money Laundering Regulations and meets all of the criteria required of an electronic data provider as outlined by the Gambling Act.

Results

Grosvenor Casinos can promote responsible gaming and reliably verify its customers at the point of entry. Authenticate supports the guiding principles outlined in its Responsible Gambling Policy as well as being fully compliant with the Gambling Act and the new Money Laundering Regulations.

"Authenticate has proved invaluable in enabling us to improve our understanding of the customers we have using our casinos. We are now proactively helping to reduce the instances of money laundering cases within the UK's casino industry and are confident that we continue to be a leading responsible gambling organisation.

Experian has proved to be the right choice for us. Their support at the start of this project and the ongoing service has been extremely professional."