Casino Enterprise Management

Brick & Click: Bringing facts to the table on integrating land-based and online gaming

GiGse Interview with Marko Hietala, Chief Security Officer, RAY

Can you tell the GiGse audience who RAY are and what gaming products you offer, online and in your land-based properties? What has been and currently is your role within RAY?
RAY (Finnish Slot Machine Association) is a national gaming company that runs slot and casino games (slot machines, table games and poker) both offline (since 1938) and online (since 2010). RAY also runs an international casino in Helsinki. Land-based games are based on different types of locations: arcades (about 80), table games in restaurants (about 250) and slot machine locations, as super-markets, kiosks etc. (around 8000). My role and career at RAY started at the same time that the online gaming project, in 2009. I was the co-director of Internet Gaming Unit, with main responsibilities around KYC (Know Your Customer), KYE (Know Your Employee), payment methods, anti-fraud, IT security, customer protection, contingency planning, risk assessment and AML (anti-money laundering). Nowadays I'm responsible for the same, but on the corporate level.

What is the regulatory landscape for online gaming in Finland?
Three monopolies share the Finnish gaming market: RAY runs the slots, table games and poker, Veikkaus runs lottery games and sportsbetting and Fintoto runs horse betting. The only restriction regarding online gaming providers in Finland is that there shall not be any marketing activities from others than the legalized operators. We received a set of different restrictions and regulations from the regulator in 2009, when we started our project. Actually there is tens of restrictions and requirements set on us: no credit cards, strong authentication of the player, mandatory daily loss limits, authorities having a real-time access to the gaming data, etc.

As a land-based operator, what made you to decide go online and when did this happen?
We were mandated by the state to channel all iGaming activity into a fully regulated enterprise to protect the consumer and to keep the money "in-house"; i.e. in the state. At the time, the estimated monetary volume going to the illegal sites was 150million EUR annually. Online was also a natural expansion of RAY’s offline operation, and a way to give a reliable and trustful choice to the Finish customer.

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