Australia’s Star Entertainment Group is looking to expand the use of smart gaming table technology to all of its baccarat tables by the end of this year and across the entire casino floor by the end of 2025, part of its work with regulators to address AML and responsible gaming issues laid bare in recent inquiries into its suitability.
Details of the company’s plans were outlined by Rick McDonald, General Manager of Table Games Strategy at Star, during a panel session at G2E Asia on Wednesday delving into the rise of smart gaming table technology across Asia-Pacific.
According to McDonald, The Star Sydney has been utilizing Angel’s hybrid RFID/AI smart table solution on 75 baccarat tables for more than three years now but plans to significantly enhance its presence to bolster compliance and further improve service levels.
“We are moving to a mandatory smart table framework by the end of 2025,” he said, adding that regulators in both NSW and Queensland – the two states in which Star operates – have viewed the implementation positively.
“We’ll be scaling up to all of our baccarat product by the end of this year and we’ve had a lot of time engaging with the regulators about it. Their objectives will be a little bit different to ours in terms of the primary outputs: game integrity and accurate player activity is what’s crucial to them.
“We are now obligated in Australia to issue all of our patrons a statement of their play, so it’s not just for our purposes – for the customer it’s ‘What is your turnover, what is your accurate win/loss’. And at the moment, on analog products, that’s very much an estimate. We can make observations on time of play and average bet, but the power of this data is very different for a baccarat customer to what it is for non-smart tables, and the regulator has been exceptionally supportive of our investments in that. They’re working very closely with us as we expand baccarat across the floor and also as we start thinking about other games. It has been very, very well received.”
McDonald explained that Star initially looked into installing smart gaming table technology as a means of providing a competitive advantage ahead of the 2020 opening of rival Crown Sydney, but said the tables have provided significant benefits across the board in the years since.
“We have been able to deliver better outcomes for guests as it relates to integrity of the game, but also the ratings, operational efficiency, asset protection and then the insights and analytics is crucial,” he said.
“Being able to make good decisions about product placement, game layouts, incentives, promotions and just true customer and product win/loss. A lot of the decisions about how we’re designing layouts and things like that have been shaped by that data, so it’s not just data to understand the customers and the commercials, it’s also informing the next stage of what we’ve been building.”
McDonald also revealed that Star is now looking at incorporating chip attribution technology – where any gaming chip purchased by a customer is attributed to them for however long it remains in their possession – into its smart table arsenal once full smart table roll-out is complete.
“It will be a key part of our financial crime and money laundering objectives in the coming 12 to 18 months,” he said. “Our challenge is that baccarat is only about 60% of our [table games] product, so while [attribution] can be very effective at a baccarat table or cage, people will move those chips around everywhere. Once we close that loop and we have smart enablement at all products and in all points – buying, playing or redeeming – I think we’ll see the next horizon of the fraud mitigation.
“That’s been a huge focus for our regulator. The financial crime and stored value risk of chips and being able to know who’s they are, who has them, has been a very, very hot topic.”
RelatedPosts
