The customer

The NSUS Group is a leading iGaming business consultancy, managing some of the world’s biggest iGaming brands, including GGPoker and ClubGG.

In just a few years, NSUS Group has turned its GGPoker operation into the biggest online poker room globally, holding the world record for the largest prize pool for any online poker tournament at $25,559,500*.

The challenge

The iGaming industry is fiercely competitive and customer acquisition costs are continually rising as Operators vie for market share. To remain competitive, Gaming brands must invest heavily into marketing and advertising campaigns to attract new customers and retain existing ones. Reducing the customer acquisition cost, while preventing underage sign-ups is a key challenge for the industry and iGaming firms like GGPoker.

As a regulated business, GGPoker must strike a balance between compliance, responsible gambling and customer experience. GGPoker not only provides its players with the most entertaining poker experience, but also ensures player protection and responsible gaming sits at the core, preventing players from gambling beyond their means or underage gamers.

However, if the player onboarding process is too difficult or has too many barriers to entry, this results in a poor user experience and an increase in the customer drop off rate of genuine players. GGPoker must perform a full age verification check along with validating name and address to ensure it safely onboards the right type of customer and to deliver stringent compliance with regulations.

A successful age verification and identity check is crucial to maximise genuine customer acquisition rates, however, with their previous process GGPoker only converted 50% of players acquired.

The solution

“Since adopting the GBG's identity and address verification solutions for KYC checks, GGPoker has improved its customer pass rate by 30%. This has helped reduce overall player acquisition costs, helping us grow our business responsibly.”

Paul Burke, Managing Director
NSUS Limited, part of NSUS Group

NSUS team spoke to the iGaming experts at GBG who highlighted three main problems causing their low customer pass rates; poor-quality address data being captured at onboarding, rudimentary matching routines and a limited range of reference data to match a player's identity against.

With this new insight, the GBG team set-up a Proof of Concept (POC) to batch test 600 previously rejected players to see if they could increase their player match rates using GBG’s solutions. The results were positive.

Firstly, GBG’s Loqate solution was used to identify players addresses quickly and accurately populating NSUS’s database with standardised, error-free address data that helps improve match rates against data sources such the UK Electoral Roll. Capturing the address accurately at the point of onboarding helps with verifying the individual downstream.

ID3Global was then used to seamlessly verify players identities in seconds ensuring compliance with Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering regulations, while preventing underage sign-ups. ID3Global is trusted by hundreds of global gaming Operators around the world to speed up player onboarding and maximising customer approval rates as well as identify fraudulent identities or underage players.

To further increase player match rates, GBG’s Multi Bureau solution was used to verify a customers identity against in all three of the UK’s credit reference agencies, Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. This innovative new feature of our ID3global identity verification solution, maximises the number of verified credit records a business can access, delivering more matches and maximising the number of customers passing straight through with confidence onboarding first time.

With the combined power of GBG's solutions, the POC was a huge a success and we were able to immediately identify 65% of previously rejected players.

NSUS decided to add GBG’s Loqate and ID3Global solutions to their player onboarding for its UK GGPoker website. GBG worked with NSUS team to improve the age verification match rate when onboarding new players. GBG simplified the process by improving the quality of the data sources needed to cross reference against, enabling NSUS to reduce the number of data points down, helping to improve operational efficiency responsibly and deliver regulatory compliance.

30% uplift in successful age verifications using GBG ID3global and Loqate, and preventing underage sign-ups, while allowing GGPoker to let more legitimate customers start playing.

“We had a problem to solve and GBG has helped us to solve it,” says Paul Burke, Managing Director of NSUS Limited, part of NSUS Group.

The outcome

After adopting GBG ID3global and Loqate’s address verification solution, GGPoker’s age check pass rate has soared from 50% to 80% – an increase of 30%, enabling more UK customers to start playing immediately, driving significant uplift in acquisition rates and income while protecting underage players, ensuring complete compliance with UK regulation.

Based on this excellent result and GBG’s rapid project delivery, NSUS has recently extended its GBG partnership to tackle a similar challenge: age checking in the highly regulated German market.

“GBG have met and exceeded our expectations, and we’re very happy. NSUS ongoing technical support and advice has been excellent, GBG know the gaming sector and the different requirements and regulations in each market very well and they are very price-competitive too. As we continue to expand into new territories, we look forward to expanding our relationship further.”

Rebekah Jackson, Director of Gaming for GBG states, “We have worked closely with the NSUS and GGPoker team, providing the best of breed technology and advice to help them to responsibly increase their player acquisition rates, improve the player onboarding experience and deliver compliance. We look forward to continuing to be NSUS technology partner of choice for identity verification, fraud prevention and compliance.”

“GBG have met and exceeded our expectations, and we’re very happy. NSUS ongoing technical support and advice has been excellent, GBG know the gaming sector and the different requirements and regulations in each market very well and they are very price-competitive too. As we continue to expand into new territories, we look forward to expanding our relationship further.”

Paul Burke, Managing Director
NSUS Limited, part of NSUS Group