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Antigua and Barbuda should take full advantage of the opportunities made available from last year's UK white listing, according to Chief Executive Officer of Technical Systems Testing (TST), Salim Adatia.
Adatia was one of the many high-profile presenters at the 2nd International Financial Crime Prevention & Compliance Training (IFCCT) Symposium and Training Course.
Adatia stated that being white listed would present huge opportunities and considerable potential for any country in terms of advancing its gaming industry operations and sustainability.
For Antigua and Barbuda specifically, Adatia stated, people on the island, who have software systems, are now able to advertise to the EU and can do more "cross-agreement" between systems at home and those that are in other white listed jurisdictions.
The result of this being that a redundancy or failover system can be created in Antigua and Barbuda.
Failover refers to the capability to switch over automatically to a redundant or standby computer, system or network upon the failure of the previously active server, system, or network.
In the past, operators on the island had their systems primarily in the UK or on one of the other white-listed jurisdictions. Now, according to Adatia, there is opportunity for Antigua and Barbuda to either be the primary hosting jurisdiction and still have access to the EU or be a contingency or back-up solution where people have their off-site redundancy systems.
In terms of ensuring that systems in Antigua and Barbuda are safe and secure, Adatia stated that a good place to start would be to ensure that people providing gaming services adhere to the technical standards of the Financial Services and Regulatory Commission (FSRC), considering that there exists a set of standards that software suppliers and operators must adhere to.
Adatia continued, "The key to making sure that the integrity of those operations are safe, secure, fair and auditable is to make sure that they are adhering to these standards."
Adatia stated that there are a number of approved test labs that are available to operators, including his own company TST.
Third party independent test labs like TST are responsible for testing operators and software suppliers after which reports are submitted to the FSRC for their approval.
Adatia noted, "The test labs themselves are not regulators and we would not purport to be within our power to say ‘yes this person can go live' or ‘no this person cannot go live'; we don't have that authority. What we do is we remain independent, we do technical assessments and we provide recommendations for certification."
Test labs also reserve the right to report identity errors or omissions, which should be considered by the FSRC before they give a gaming operator or software supplier permission to go live.
Source: Antigua Sun
