Inside Asian Gaming

IAG OCT 2022年10月 亞博匯 26 I’ve been here for three weeks now and almost the entirety of that time has been spent meeting regulators and talking to stakeholders externally to get a good understanding of what we need to do and the areas we need to address, plus reviewing all the work that has been done to date. An awful lot has been done over the past 15 months by [former CEO] Steve McCann and the team. We’ve brought on some solid horsepower to help with the operations and the transformation work that is the next step in the process as we get through mediation. That is my clear focus, to really turn this mediation and transformation work into something that leads us to become a real gold standard in terms of safe and responsible gaming going forward. BB: What do you see as your single biggest challenge? CC: I think tech is going to be a huge challenge. Some of the new technology that we’re going to have to develop over the next couple of years to do what we need to do [to satisfy new responsible gaming and anti- money laundering regulations] just doesn’t exist today, so we’re working with various vendors and suppliers in making sure that we fully understand what the requirements are, that they fully understand what the requirements are and are able to work with us on the development of that within the time frames that we have. In some cases we have some pretty tight timelines. The good thing is that the stakeholders externally, they understand that and they are working with us. It’s good for them to see, and they have seen, that our trajectory is as it should be, that we are moving in the right direction towards suitability and then transformation beyond that. BB: Why are you the right person to lead Crown forward? CC: I’ve been in this business for 30 years – nearly all of that time in Asia and 20 of it in Macau – so I’ve run the world’s largest properties, have run the world’s most luxurious and awarded properties. I had to be responsible for a regulatory environment within Macau for all the publicly listed companies I worked for there to be compliant with the Hong Kong Exchange. The last two companies I worked for (Sands and Wynn) were also US companies so we had to be compliantwithvarious regulatory bodies in other jurisdictions. So I’ve got great experience operationally across the size and scale and scope and the COVER STORY