In April 2021, the Act on Remote Gambling (Kansspelen op afstand – KOA) came into force and online gambling was allowed from 1 October this year. Since then, 11 online gambling companieshave been licensed for the Dutch market. More than half of them are now using CDDN’s eKYC services. “Without CDDN’s solutions, we would never have been able to get up and running so quickly.

” Last October was not exactly the quietest month for Alexander van den Hurk, Head of Casino & Integrations at BetCity, one of then 10 companies that secured a licence to offer online gambling in the Netherlands on 1 October. “Not only was the enthusiasm for online gambling a lot greater than expected, everything was also completely new. Not only for us, but also for the other providers. It is then very reassuring that you can rely on a company like CDDN and know that they are also constantly contributing ideas for this new market.”

Strict legislation
To be allowed into the Dutch online gambling market, companies must meet many requirements. Strict laws apply to prevent misuse, money laundering, fraud and gambling addiction. Besides the aforementioned Act on Remote Gambling (KOA), other applicable legislation include the Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing (Prevention) Act (Wwft), the General Data Protection Regulation (AVG) and a variety of tax laws. This means that the online gaming companies have to carry out quite a few checks before a customer can and may create an account online to play a game of poker or roulette or place a bet on a football match.

“CDDN has a whole range of automated options that can perform these essential checks for us,” says Van den Hurk. “Moreover, it is a trustworthy Dutch company that knows how the laws and regulations work in the Netherlands. I know of few others that can do what CDDN can do.”

BetCity, as well as the other 10 licence holders, are obliged to check whether their customers are who they say they are, whether they live where they say they live, whether the bank account provided actually belongs to the customer and whether a customer is not listed in the Central Register of Excluded Gamblers (Cruks).

For these checks, BetCity uses CDDN’s electronic Know Your Customer (eKYC) products, among other things. Van den Hurk: “We check via the CDDN database whether someone’s address is the same as the address they provided themselves. If that’s not the case, a check is then done using iDIN, again via CDDN. For now, we still check identity documents ourselves, just like the check in the Cruks register. But I don’t rule out asking CDDN to do that in the future too.”

Version 1
Van den Hurk sees the current way of working, only one and a half months after it first became possible to gamble online, as version 1. “When you speak to me in six months’ time, I’m sure that a lot will have already changed, both with us and with the other licensees. I know by now that for CDDN, automating processes is in their DNA. And I anticipate that we’ll be making even more use of that.”

The more that the login procedures and checks can be automated, the more pleasant it is for the gambling companies. And for their customers. “It’s nice to know within a few minutes whether you can play, isn’t it? Instead of entering all your data and then seeing a screen that says ‘You will be hearing from us’. This happened to several providers in the first weeks after 1 October. Without CDDN’s solutions, we would never have been able to get started so quickly.”