Within the gambling Industry, licence holders, suppliers and regulators need to ensure they have robust checks and measures in place to guard against money laundering & associated risks posed through their numerous and extensive business relationships. 

This is particularly pertinent with large transactions and those from or linked to higher risk jurisdictions and the high growth markets of Asia and South America.   Having foresight and understanding of your risk exposure, whether it is regulatory, reputational or both, will ensure the business knows exactly who it is “really” dealing with; allowing for educated, risk-based decisions.  

As part of our intelligence gathering, this year alone Acuris Risk Intelligence has undertaken over 300 B-2-B projects for the purpose of due diligence within the gambling sector. Our whitepaper details the analysis of our observations and findings from this unique insight to help businesses better understand where risks lurk. 

Although much of the B-2-B relationship screening can be managed extremely well by due diligence teams internally, we are seeing a trend of gaming merchants & gambling regulators requiring external support for more complex cases; for example, higher risk jurisdictions and complex, or more opaque ownership structures. 

Our findings range from uncovering minor risks such as fines, unknown parties within business relationships who are actually beneficiaries, to trustees and shadow directors, and further to discovering direct links to Political Exposure (PEPs) and people with highly questionable money-laundering or corruption links. 

The findings of the reports concluded:

• 55% of entities show negative media coverage of the third-party company, its directors or beneficial owner
• 26% of third-party companies are linked to PEPs, while 8% of the due diligence reports uncovered high-ranking PEPs among the directors or owners of the third-party company
• 19% of the cases showed links to companies listed in the leaked database of offshore records known as Panama papers
• 15% of cases share a combination of PEP and negative media risk
• 15% of cases found a fine or injunction imposed by the third-party company’s sector regulator 

Download the full report for the in-depth analysis.