Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming July 2014 18 Securing the Pit When it comes to protecting casino currency, GPI continues to light the way—literally C ustomer communication is more than a strategy at Gaming Partners International. It’s a discipline. In Asia this has been sharpened to a particularly fine edge since the Macau office opened three years ago, a move that positioned the company to listen and learn as never before. The result, as Scott McCarthy, vice president of sales for Asia, explains it, is that GPI is introducing new, more secure casino currency products in the region with greater confidence at every stage of the development process, which is saying something for one of the great innovators in this most demanding of fields. “Before it was a case where you might hear something, it might be three months or six months before you start to talk about an order,” he says, “and that might not have necessarily been remembered in the development. But now we’re here all the time, so we go on site, we talk to the customers, and they say, ‘We’ve had this challenge this week,’ so we go back, we take notes, those notes are uploaded and shared among our development teams.” Engagement with the operator doesn’t end there either. Far from it. “That’s something else that we’re doing differently now,” he says. “We’re doing a lot more alpha prototypes. Before we get anything finalized we get it out to all our partners in the market. They have the opportunity to use it, to play with it, to get internal feedback. We can fine-tune it at that point before we go to beta and before we release it to manufacturing.” Security is the bottom line for GPI’s casino partners, hard- pressed as they are, in booming Macau especially, to protect their most precious asset—their chips, plaques and jetons—from the twin plagues of counterfeiting and theft. GPI has been in the trenches with them, “feeling their pain,” as Mr McCarthy puts it, and has lost no time in crafting a range of solutions. In the vanguard is a new multilayered UV authentication tool—3-in-1 UV—which was unveiled in May at G2E Asia. It provides operators with a veritable firewall of security, actually, three of them, the foundation of which is the company’s exclusive gaming industry rights to a chemical signature (a taggant, as it’s called) that is blended covertly into a chip’s pigment to respond to ultraviolet light at a wavelength of 312 nanometers by glowing a bright orange while remaining invisible under the standard wavelength of 365nm. “UV’s fantastic,” Mr McCarthy explains, “because it’s fast and Feature easy to authenticate, which is very important on a table. You want to be able to verify the chips that are coming in quickly. You don’t want to slow down the game. But UV has been out for so long it’s readily available. The pigment is readily available. It’s used in so many different industries for so many different things. It’s not that it’s been counterfeited. It’s just used incorrectly, unfortunately.” Completing the package of protections is a unique “fingerprint” verifiable with a laboratory spectrometer, supported additionally by the ability to perform forensic analysis with DNA-level exactness using scanning electron microscopy. 3-in-1’s taggant can be incorporated into solid colors in any number of locations on the chip, including the inserts and inner ring, and added to edge spots for quick verification in a tray or chip rack. It can also be read with a special dual-wavelength 312/365 lamp for added flexibility. The company also has moved decisively to ensure that holograms retain their integrity as one of the industry’s prized security features. Mr McCarthy notes that “When holograms were first brought out the equipment was not commonplace, and the actual printing of the material itself was hard to come by. But now it’s very commonplace. And we’re seeing brilliant copies to the point that they’re sharp and they’re accurate. It’s not just us, even the credit cards and the monetary authorities are having the same challenges. Anyone using holograms are having similar challenges.” GPI’s response is SecuriFilm, which employs an exclusive foil that shows a traditional hologram on an initial examination and then generates a distinct pattern when a chip is turned under fluorescent light, which also reveals a small “box” that identifies the piece as authentic. The film can be designed to produce different colors as well, and for added security the foil is readable separately by a special device that can be installed for back-of-house verification. And the chip designs are fully customizable. “We’re here all the time, so we go on site, we talk to the customers, we go back, we take notes, those notes are uploaded and shared among our development teams.” Scott McCarthy | vice president of sales for Asia