“A roller coaster” is how Martijn de Boer of CDDN describes the past year. “Sometimes I can’t believe that the market for online gambling has been open for only a year. When you look at what we have all achieved, it seems like five years.” De Boer looks back.

The Remote Gambling Act (KOA) came into force in April 2021 and online gambling has only been allowed in the Netherlands since 1 October of that year. A lot has happened at CDDN’s offices in Nieuw-Vennep since then.

“We got off to a pretty good start,” says De Boer, looking back. “We were able to immediately add a few great names to our portfolio, such as BetCity and Bingoal. But I must honestly say that we also had to do a lot of probing in the beginning. The market was new and nobody knew exactly what to expect and what exactly was needed.”

On 23 February 2022, De Boer was a guest in the Gaming in Holland Webinar ‘Essential services in a regulated market’. Among other things, he talked about how CDDN helps more than 60% of the online casinos active in the Dutch market with onboarding and checking their players. Martijn also discussed the reason why many online players quit during onboarding. “One important reason is that a citizen service number is requested in the Netherlands. Players see this as a risk.”

The online gambling market received negative attention around that time due to reports that minors would be able to gamble. None of these cases involved companies using CDDN’s services. In other words, VerifyMe did its job.

CDDN has also offered ongoing monitoring since March 2022. This lets online casinos monitor, without any extra effort, whether players registered with them still comply with the strict laws and regulations. The first online casinos active on the Dutch market are now connected to CDDN’s ongoing monitoring system.

Shortly afterwards, a new innovation was launched that allows identification of official documents via an OCR scan – with a smartphone – to be successful in one go in 97 percent of cases. In the unlikely event that things go wrong and the ID Document Check produces incorrect data, adjustment has recently become easier. As a result, customers do not have to scan their document again during onboarding, which saves a lot of frustration. Moreover, this means that all data required to comply with legislation is easily and quickly read and customers can onboard very fast. As a result, customers are less likely to quit during the online registration procedure.

Together with a growing number of online casinos and, since mid-2022, more and more umbrella iGaming platforms, CDDN managed to significantly optimize the first version of VerifyMe. “What also helped was our participation in the Gaming in Holland trade fair in June,” says De Boer. “But I also notice that our name is being spread around in the industry. Both the companies themselves and a number of legal parties recommend us.”

Another factor is that onboarding via VerifyMe is becoming faster and smoother. Following the latest update in Q3, it can even be done within two minutes. “But checks for insolvency and relocations also became an increasingly popular product. A growing number of companies are now using this. And we always keep improving the service.”

Towards the end of 2022, De Boer also saw a number of online casinos that did not initially use CDDN’s services come back to him. “They see that we are very successful in most of the market and are therefore reconsidering their previous decision. That makes us optimistic about 2023,” continues De Boer. “I expect the number of casinos that work with our systems to double.”