Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | May 2009 28 Mr Doyle adds that Bally SDS is focused on maintaining an open system architecture so that Bally SDS can work with equipment from other manufacturers. “All of the features that we work with on Bally SDS work not only with our systems but inmany cases with systems that are proprietary. One of the things we’ve been able to accomplish is to keep an open architecture so that we can work with everybody’s systems. We give proprietary developers manuals so they can interface with our system and be able to do a lot of promotional features.” Part of the business proposition of slot data systems is their ability to add value for operators and customers. One way of achieving this is to utilise information about players in such a way that not only are marketing offers relevant to that particular player, but also that they encourage active participation by the player in the marketing exercise. One way to achieve this is by allowing the player choices about how they redeem an offer. “A feature being offered in our casino systems is Dynamic Offer Redemption. Bally Power Promotions is essentially the ability of a player to convert their player club points into cash. Bally Power Rewards is essentially the ability for somebody to receivepromotional offers. Say you come into the casino on Thursday and we put 20 or say 100 bucks into your account, or you play this much and we award you this much—promotional offers and things of that nature. Say you win a Bally Power Winners jackpot; we’ll send 40 bucks into your account. In general, Bally Power Awards will throw money into an account and that person then has that much money in there, and they can draw down pieces of it. Dynamic Offer Redemption is a different feature that instead of taking the money and throwing it into an account, we offer the customer a deal—say if they come in on a Saturday night in the month of June, when it’s your birthday, what we’re going to do is give you a promotional offer. It’s a specific offer. You come in, you put your [player] card in, you key in a pin number, and all of a sudden this offer is going to download right onto the game,” says Mr Doyle. “We also have a random generation of awards feature. An operator can take say a thousand of its customers and randomly generate an encrypted award that then sits next to their account. When the customer comes in they can redeem it. They have no clue what they’re going to get until they do redeem it. They could get five bucks [dollars], but the advertising the operator sends out will point out the lucky players can win anything from say a guaranteed five dollars up to five thousand dollars. The random generation awards feature creates urgency; it creates offers that customers don’t want to miss. It allows operators more flexibility in their bonusing than does standard offer redemption.” Bally SDS 11’s increased functionality includes the ability for operators to set their own parameters regarding how and when the system should issue an alarm for suspicious or untoward activity on the gaming floor. Mr Doyle says this functionality was developed into response to real life situations that have occurred in casinos. “There was a case for example in the Mid-West of the United States where some slot machines were erroneously set up for the wrong currency. So every US$20 bill a customer put in, the machines read at an eight to one value. The bottom line was that for that US$20 the machine showed US$160-worth of credit. During the course of the day this happened enough that they actually ran out of paper in the machines to print tickets. The casino was down tens and tens of thousands of dollars. “Finally some customer alerted the management and said ‘I think people are cheating these machines’. It may be that the customers are going to recycle that cash in the property the next day. But the point is that the money is out the door, the customers are out the door, and the fraud has already occurred. “With our suspicious activity reports, the casino sets the parameters. It could be for example to issue a report any time I [the casino] issue more than five tickets without any coin in or credit play on the machine, or if I issue five tickets even if there may be play in between. The alerts go off with surveillance and say ‘Hey look, you’ve got something going on with this machine that just doesn’t look right’. This allows operators to catch some of these scams before they go too far. The same thing applies to promotional credits,” explains Mr Doyle. “We’ve seen a couple of situations—some our systems, some other people’s systems—where customers [casinos] have set up the system incorrectly so that players accidentally get a huge amount of promotional credits. The next thing you know the players are in there cashing out right and left. Our systems also have other protections to limit the maximum amount per day per customer that can be cashed out, but our additional protections with Bally SDS 11 tell the operator ‘Something strange is going on. Go out to the machine, look at the player account and see what is going on’. We get a lot of ideas from our [operator] customers. They are the ones that drive the ideas and the concepts—things we want to add to the system. There’s no point in coming up with great concepts if nobody buys them. We’re focused always on listening, learning and adapting to what the market wants,” stresses Mr Doyle. Bally Technologies E xecutives at Bally Technologies Inc.’s latest Asia-Pacific User Conference in Macau firmly laid to rest the notion that its systems are the gaming equivalent of a family town car—solid and reliable at the expense of innovation. The truth is just the opposite, says Tom Doyle, Vice President, Product Management, revealing that Bally has been collaborating with, among others, the mighty Cisco Systems in developing the new generation of high speed networks. “One of the biggest advantages you’re going to see with Bally is that as a companywewent out and acquired a lot of other companies. Along with those companies we acquired a lot of the intellectual resources of developers that had done many different things in many different markets,” explains Mr Doyle. Speeding Ahead Bally Technologies’ know-how is among the best in the business says the company