Placing a sports bet from your slot machine will be the future at many of the nation’s casinos.
That’s the vision of JCM Global. The company will showcase the technology at the Global Gaming Expo now that sports betting is proliferating around the country with the U.S. Supreme Court in May striking down the federal ban on it. The world’s leading transaction technology supplier for the banking, retail, kiosk and gaming industries is gaining traction with its technology that essentially turns the slot machine into a kiosk.
Tom Nieman, JCM’s vice president of global marketing, said that when paired with iVIZION and GEN5, the company’s FUZION technology creates the possibility for each slot machine to become a multi-line profit center. The games will have the potential to vend and redeem race and sports betting; vend and redeem lottery tickets; facilitate Daily Fantasy Sports wagering; conduct cross-enterprise promotional couponing for carded and un-carded players; enable real-time currency exchange with exchange rates that could be preset or could be real-time; and streamline tax forms processes by printing system-generated tax forms. The games will deliver the required documentation to the customer while the back-end system stores the signature forms and data that needs to be delivered to the IRS.
“We showed the FUZION concept and a ton of its features last year, and this year we certainly made progress,” Nieman said. “It’s a patented technology now, and that’s always an exciting new feature when you can get it protected. The key thing is we completed that we’re showing a fully functional virtual wallet. If and when the industry slides closer to some form of cashless, the FUZION device can accommodate that.”
On the sports book side, FUZION kicks in by touching the screen of the slot machine. It drops in a picture-in-picture element that allows the player sitting at the machine to have a full menu of offerings at the sports book, Nieman said.
“They can make their wager from the comfort of their slot machine seat without ever having to cash out and leave it,” Nieman said. “They can make their wager and draw down off their credit meter. We will print out either the ticket in-ticket out (TITO) ticket with the wager on it if that’s how they want it or do virtual TITO tickets and transfer that to the phone, so you have your ticket digitally on your phone.”
FUZION has been granted its patent and the technology has been submitted to Gaming Labs International for review, Nieman said.
“I think it will increase the revenue of the sports book,” Nieman said. “You can stand in line and place your wager with a live person at the counter, go to the kiosk or go to the slot machine. All we have done is turn the slot machine into a kiosk. If you have 1,000 machines on the floor, you have 1,000 kiosks in the floor. You can sit at the slot machine and open the window and bet the Patriots this weekend giving 6 points. If it’s $5, hit wager and it subtracts from my balance on my slot machine and issues me a ticket.”
JCM has completed the virtual TITO ticket, Nieman said. When people take their TITO win off the machine, they can put it on their phone and carry that bar-coded design to the next machine.
JCM continues to enhance the anti-money laundering features on it because the currency validator, the iVIZION, reads the entire note and looks at the entire image as opposed to taking data points, which has been the traditional form of currency validation, Nieman said.
“When you take that entire image, you can refine your optical character reading, and now we can read serial numbers on all the notes. That will help bolster the casino’s efforts in strengthening their AML protection,” Nieman said.
With more than 250,000 units shipped to date, its CIS technology scans the entire note or ticket, reading more than 9.5 million data points on every note, more than twice that of the nearest competitor, Nieman said.
iVIZION’s partner is the GEN5 thermal printer, and with its CPU and print speed, it has the flexibility to print TITO and promotional tickets, and various wager tickets and templated promo coupons, Nieman said.
Nieman said OEMs, original equipment manufacturers, are working to implement more elements of FUZION in their back-end casino management systems.
