Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | March 2012 36 GPI G PI’s purchase last year of a mould manufacturing company—located near its French headquarters in the world-famous wine producing region of Burgundy—is bearing fruit. The company says it enables greater customisation of chips for venue operators and, crucially, enhances the chain of custody for any exclusive new security technologies that GPI wishes to introduce in the continual arms race against the counterfeiters. Inside Asian Gaming spoke during ICE 2012 to Kirsten Clark, GPI’s Vice President of Global Marketing and Product Management, to find out more. IAG : Please explain what you’ve been doing with chip customisation. Kirsten Clark : Last summer we completed the acquisition of OMC, a high- precision mould-making company located near our French headquarters in Beaune. One of the driving forces behind this acquisition was to be able to offer a much higher level of product customisation to casinos. In the months since, we’ve put a lot of emphasis on being able to create very intricate chip mould designs. That gives our customers the ability to have a more customised product and a more brand-driven experience when their players use the chips. What’s different about this compared to ‘traditional’ chip manufacturing? To give you a bit of history, if you’re purchasing an American-style chip, the way it’s been done in the past is that the customer would select a chip style from a ‘menu’ of standard chip designs built from existing chip moulds. And really all the casino did other than periodically deciding to ‘customise’ the chip with a denomination or by adding their name, was to pick the colour combinations that would be used in the various injection shots. This has primarily been because high-precision moulds are expensive and time-consuming to develop. And the more moulds a chip requires, the more difficult it is to manufacture and keep the product structurally intact. With our acquisition of OMC and the greater emphasis we’re placing on offering more intricate designs that are structurally sound, we’re taking American-style chip design to a new level that is more visually appealing and flexible than existing designs and offers casinos the ability to make their ‘money’ even more counterfeit resistant. This isn’t to say that standard chip designs aren’t still an important option, or that their designs haven’t advanced and become more intricate. We’re just now giving our customers a much broader set of options with customised designs. “Casinos want to make their chips an easily-identifiable piece of authentic inventory. We’ve been working diligently to fine-tune our design and engineering capabilities so we can go to our customers and say: ‘You don’t have to just pick your chips from a menu. We can work with you to create something that is uniquely yours’.” As casinos look to enhance their competitive edge, especially in the aggressive Asian gaming market, they are looking at more diverse ways to create a total brand package. So, by offering casinos the opportunity to individualise their chip design and align it with their marketing and branding strategies, we can produce a currency product that is not only uniquely tailored to the customer’s needs, but also, due to the added complexity of the design, is more counterfeit resistant than traditionally- manufactured chips. Who’s buying the new products? Since we started offering these more intricate chips in 2011, we’ve successfully filled significant orders for numerous large Asian operators. We have one operator, for example, who is now using a beautiful chip that incorporates their iconic building design into the chip ring. And another operator recently began using a chip that uses their brand mark as part of the chip design, creating a visually striking chip that really is one of a kind. It’s been a real honour for our talented designers and engineers to work with these operators to develop these unique designs, especially since they are being used on the gaming floors as part of the branding experience.That’s an important consideration when you’re talking about a big gaming venue. But design is just one aspect of the equation: casinos also want to make their chips an easily-identifiable piece of authentic inventory, and we’ve been working diligently to fine-tune our design and engineering capabilities so we can go to our customers and say: ‘You don’t have to just pick your chips from a menu. We can work with you to create something that is uniquely yours’. Are there security benefits that come with having your own moulding operation? Sure, because when we’re talking about casino currency we’re really talking about money, and developing and producing custom moulds in-house ensures that the chip design chain of custody remains intact. For every chip design or security feature we Custom Job Gaming Partners International Corporation is offering its customers ever-improved security and more customisation in the design of casino currency Dragon layers—GPI’s five-shot chip with dragon design