"Player protection and responsible gambling will remain a key talking point throughout 2020"

What will be Innovative Technology's focus and highlights at ICE London 2020? What are your key expectations and goals for the show?

ICE is the biggest gaming show in the world and provides an ideal platform for us to preview new and exciting products to the market. This year we are highlighting both our Spectral Technology and ICU age verification & facial recognition devices. ICE gives us the opportunity to gain important customer feedback and network with industry colleagues and is an important event in the ITL (Innovative Technology) calendar.

Since the introduction of ICU age verification in 2019, we have been developing the product and can now offer facial recognition technology. ICU uses artificial intelligence and ITL’s own algorithms to instantly verify age and the next iteration of ICU can now identify faces. ICU Age Verification can therefore ensure compliance to prevent underage gambling and safeguard children, while ICU facial recognition can allow operators to identify VIPs and those who have willingly self-excluded or have been excluded.  

We will also focus on showing ICE visitors the advantages of using Spectral Technology when validating and recycling cash with our new Spectral Payout. This state-of-the-art recycler is ideal for high volume applications requiring multi-denomination recycling at fast speeds. Its large 80 note recycling capacity allows it to store and recycle all denominations from a given currency helping to manage float levels more efficiently and keep machines operational. Using Spectral Technology, it comes with the added benefit of complete note image capture (highest spectral coverage) to authenticate banknote validity and protect against fraudulent and stained notes. 

Could you share your prospects and outlook for the global gaming industry in 2020, regarding trends, emerging markets and technologies, new demands, challenges and opportunities, etc.? What are your strategies and approach in that sense?

The global gaming market has experienced significant changes over the past few years and we think that this is set to continue for 2020 with technology leading the way. Our core business at Innovative Technology is automating transactions in a continuously changing payment sector industry. We have grown and evolved accordingly to meet the demands of the market and our suite of products now enables customers to verify the identification of coins, banknotes, tickets and people in order to facilitate automation in an intelligent way.

For operators, being able to offer combined payment options, depending on the preferred payment methods of the country, is key to producing operational efficiencies to fuel business growth and stay ahead of the game. Player protection and responsible gambling will also remain a key talking point throughout 2020 and we will continue to work with operators to provide key solutions. 

Our modular approach to the design and provision of cash handling technology is important to us to enable our customers to easily integrate and upgrade their current products. This allows our customers to add additional functionality to generate further cash handling efficiencies. Customers will continue to demand a high level of security. Producing highly secure verification and identification products is, and will remain, at the heart of our core business.

Innovative Technology will showcase at ICE London 2020 on February 4-6, at Stand N1-430.