Inside Asian Gaming

July 2011 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 39 games played per hour, and therefore increase revenue. Slot machine validators can do about one bill for every 2.5 or 3 seconds. The Project 8 prototype does eight bills a second. It’s a generational leap from a single feed validator. We wanted to give this market—which is so unique—a unique product to help both the operator and the patron. As an operator, if you’ve already got the players to come to your casino, you then want to have them entertained for as long as possible and have them make as many decisions per hour as possible. Usually a bill buy-in process is a manual, laborious, process. It tends to take a significant amount of time for the interaction between the player and the dealer, but more importantly it slows down the game for the other patrons. They want to gamble, rather than watch money being counted. Throughout my career, my goal in developing products has been to enhance the player experience. Please talk us through how it works. Imagine I have walked into the casino with a stack of bills. The bills are handed to the dealer who simply inserts them into the Project 8 prototype. The unit then counts and validates the bills and pushes them into an escrow area for the player to see. The value of the sum of the bills is displayed for the casino staff and the player to see. Once the player has accepted the amount, the dealer simply hits a button and the bills are stacked. If for any reason the player doesn’t agree with the tally, it’s simple and quick to do a recount. Is the tally displayed on every transaction or is it just when the player requests? It’s always generated for the player. Whenever we transition from a manual process to an electronic process, we have to be sensitive to the fact that there is a learning curve for the player and we must go the extra mile to ensure trust is developed by the player towards the device. We are, in essence, speeding up a manual process via technology. How long would that count process of say 60 bills take for that amount of cash if done manually? Our research has shown 20 bills takes anywhere from 70 seconds to 90 seconds depending on casino and dealer. In our demo to you, we have done 66 bills in less than 15 seconds including time for the player to make his or her decision on whether to accept the machine count. We want to give players the maximum amount of time doing what they came here to do—i.e. play table games. My perspective is I want to give the players the most bang for their entertainment dollar. The way we can do that here at JCM Global—as a cash management company— is to give them the faster experience. The end result is increased hands per hour or increased decisions per hour. This is JCM’s first bill validation product developed exclusively for the Asian casino market. We always say it’s for Asians, by Asians. Can you talk us through the journey of the product to market? It’s a very systematic process. The first thing that we looked at was the problem. Second, we looked for how we could solve the problem. Third, we developed the technology necessary to solve the problem. Then, from there we moved to the first prototype that’s based on best guesses of the market. Now, we’ve taken the market feedback and what we’re doing in that is we’re going to create the JCM final product. I hope Project 8 will be in the field by this time next year. The modifications we need to make based on industry feedback are not that significant. We have to get buy-in from the operators, the regulators and the players. The modifications we need to make based on industry feedback are not that significant. We’re just going to go ahead and give it a slightly different wrapper and it’ll be ready for the market. The feedback we’ve had is that everyone is excited about it. It’s a win for everyone. The operators get more decisions per hour, the regulators get more security and the players get more hands per hour. When I look at the ROI [return on investment] for this product, I really look at it as a value for time. That’s the way Project 8 has been developed. Is there any reason why this product shouldn’t also be applicable to financial services? It certainly could be. Our future focus—and that would be a localisation of the product—could be in financial services. But our primary goal today—JCM has served the gaming industry for over 20 years and I have served this industry for over 15—is to really bring this technology to the casino tables right now. We believe the effect of Project 8 could be that profound because cash count at the casino table is one of the last vestiges of a very laborious manual process. That really hasn’t changed for years.