Customer experience vs. fraud – a rock and a hard place?
| By Josephine Watson
| Reading Time: 3 minutes
Emailage discusses their recent report made in association with iGaming Business, asking the industry where their priorities lie when it comes to fraud

Across the igaming industry, moves have been made in recent years to take a more proactive approach to making gambling fairer and safer in the UK.
With many regulatory provisions coming into play this year, 2019 is a ripe time to consider if and how your identity verification and digital identity checks are keeping pace.
This in turn, however, raises concerns for operators wanting to maintain a positive, seamless customer experience. Emailage, a global fraud prevention company, saw a need in the industry for a study examining the lasting impacts of these developments on customer experience.
The resulting report, “Managing risk in a player centric world”, produced in collaboration with iGaming Business, asked online gambling operators in EMEA a series of questions regarding their views.
Respondents came from various areas of the igaming sector, providing what Emailage feels is a comprehensive view of the state of play, the opportunities and the challenges.
In a recent webinar with on leveraging digital identity intelligence, Chris Thomas, managing director of EMEA and Ermal Thaci, enterprise sales director of igaming at Emailage discussed the recent report.
Thaci highlighted the continual growth of the igaming industry, citing reports from Hexa Research predicting Global Online Gambling Revenue will grow to $74bn by 2024, and expressing a view that this continued growth has also brought with it an increase in fraud.
He continues, saying that 94% of operators struggle with fraud, and 84% are unsatisfied with payments systems’ ability to detect fraud.
Additionally, he says: “As we are now used to smartphones, tablets and having multiple devices, we expect a seamless and frictionless customer experience. Any friction we encounter is likely to push us away to a competitor.”
This was echoed by the survey respondents. When asked which was more important to their business, stopping fraud or customer experience, 71% of respondents chose the former, indicating that while compliance is necessary, ultimately operators desire to protect their customers’ experiences.
So at what point in the customer journey is fraud most prevalent? The survey showed 43% of respondents said withdrawal, 30% answered deposit and 27% said registration.
While Thomas said he was unsurprised by the ordering of these, he said: “what surprised me was that registration is still falling into a distant third. A lot of businesses have started to focus more on registration because they realise it’s more cost-effective to catch the bad actor at the point of entry as opposed to the point of exit.”
Notably, 63% of respondents identified bonus abuse as the most negative impact on their business – with the next greatest concern being account takeover at 13%.