Regulation & Responsible Gaming – the continual “game changers”

The online casino and gambling industry has changed significantly in recent years, with increased levels of regulation and a continued increase in focus on the topic of responsible gambling. The industry is keen to distance itself from the negative image associated with it in the past and to focus on ensuring that a safe, responsible, and entertaining experience is provided to users.  This change is constant and operators and platform providers need to keep abreast of the continual changes and updates in the regulatory frameworks across multiple jurisdictions. 

Where does Symphony Solutions sit within the iGaming value chain?  

The iGaming division of Symphony Solutions works with operators who are licensed and regulated and who do not carry out illegal operations. These operators are our customers. The customers of the operators are the people that register with the operator and who bet on sports or entertain themselves, playing the online casino games available on the operator websites.

FAQ 1:  Gambling is not legal in my country; can I work for Symphony Solutions? 

Absolutely, Symphony Solutions is not a Gambling operator, we are an international IT services provider and do not require a Gambling Licence. 

Responsible Gambling 

In addition to increased levels or regulation in a number of countries along with numerous states within the United State of America, the other area of ongoing maturity is that of Responsible Gambling. 

Over recent years a set of socially responsible initiatives were created to ensure the fairness and integrity of gambling operations were in place and to promote the awareness of problem gambling to end-users. These Responsible Gambling initiatives are active across governments, through control boards, and with the operators of casinos and sportsbetting operations. 

Broadly speaking the key areas that sit beneath the umbrella of Responsible Gambling are: 

• The exclusion of underage users – ensuring registration of underage users is not possible. 
• The protection of players at risk – making it easy for players to self-exclude themselves or to put in place financial limits on spending or time. 
• Accountable Marketing – making sure for example that advertising and marketing activities do not target children or players at risk that have self-excluded themselves. 
• Data privacy – ensuring that the end users’ data is private and that it remains private. 
• Online payment protection – ensuring that the system is reliable and secure so that customers can deposit, withdraw and transfer funds safely. 

Responsible Gaming procedures vary from country to country, in Sweden operators can set betting limits based on the financial information checks on end-users. In the UK the use of credit cards to pay for gambling is restricted. 

Our customers share a common goal, that goal is to ensure that gambling needs to be done at a fun and safe level, and we stand behind that ethos. 

FAQ 2: What about technology? 

The technology stacks being used are modern, often at the cutting edge. They are driven by new product development and are heavily influenced by the enormous size and scale of the systems required to support many thousands of transactions per second. It is not unusual to witness over twenty thousand transactions per second at peak times. 

Many of our teams are working to design and develop brand new products, products that are not only first to market but patented in multiple countries. Working on these new products will do wonders for your CV. 

From an infrastructure perspective, the typical iGaming systems are large and complex with a mixture of on-premise and cloud-based components.  AWS and Microsoft Azure are commonly used by iGaming operators that wish to leverage the benefits of cloud solutions. 

The advantages of working with iGaming projects from a development perspective: 

• Dynamic, highly transactional, large enterprise systems designed to work at scale.
• Great opportunity to grow both from technical and organizational perspective (working in an Agile environment). 
• Highly performant systems, with significant peak loads during large sports events. 
• Environment changes very fast (from MVP to release). 
• Working with top technologies – Serverless, Cloud, BI-Datawarehouse, etc.
• Being part of the design, delivery and launch of unique, first-to-market products. 

FAQ 3: Are Operators Agile? 

In short, the answer is yes. Whilst some are further along in their agile journey than others, most have recognized the benefits of agile product development and are familiar with working in a lean-agile manner. The majority of our customers have a number of SCRUM teams with some using Kanban. Other larger operators have worked with the Scaled Agile Framework utilizing multiple release trains. 

FAQ 4: What direction is the industry going? 

From a product development perspective, our customers want to continue to delight users, with new innovative games, games that feature live video streaming, so that customers can engage and immerse themselves in real-time. We are seeing a shift towards hybrid applications that bring elements of traditional games together with more modern game features, all designed to bring further excitement, and engagement with the end-users. 

From a geographical perspective, the growth in the US market is impressive, with many states having already legalized gambling we are seeing further growth as new states come on board. For these US-based operators, we see a focus on the user experience, with an understanding that a “using a copy and paste” approach of a European user doesn´t translate well to a US player experience. As a result, strong UX/UI and front end development skills are in demand. 

FAQ 5: OK I’m interested to hear more! What projects are available right now? 

If you join Symphony Solutions you´ll be working for us and representing Symphony Solutions, helping to design and develop new products and applications for operators both in a business to consumer (B2C) environment and in business to business (B2B) focused organizations. 

We have a number of exciting projects working with top iGaming operators. 

From those based in the USA developing B2B solutions for the Casino and Sportsbetting verticals to those based in Malta with B2C brands. 

We have outlined a couple of them here for you to give you a taste of what is available. 

Avantage Entertainment – a top-tier US-based operator in both the B2C and B2B space.  
Casumo – a highly respected Malta-based operator with both online casino and sportsbetting products.  

Be sure to bookmark our vacancies for updates and information on the many other roles that we have. If you see a role that either you or indeed one of your friends might be suitable for, then share or apply! The future is bright.

A true leader and veteran in the iGaming industry, he has contributed to the success of numerous brands and operators throughout Europe, Latin America and Asia. 

Eduardo dos Remedios

VP of iGaming at Symphony Solutions