FEATURE: AGE VERIFICATION
AGECHECKED Bill Healey chats to Alastair Graham, CEO, AgeChecked When was the company founded and what was the inspiration behind starting the organisation? The idea of AgeChecked germinated during a Christmas family holiday. I was sitting with my young nephew who was watching a children’s channel on TV. When my sister-in-law left the room, my nephew switched to the TV’s apps and started watching a gang of eight-year-old boys teasing a sixyear-old girl, really inappropriately, on YouTube. There was something so wrong with the scenario; my nephew was still watching “children’s entertainment” on a TV, but now the content was technically unbroadcastable. There was no regulation stopping YouTube from showing this content to children, but that didn’t make it right. So, I started thinking about the challenge of understanding the age of online customers and saw that this was an issue across many online industries, not just video sharing platforms. I thought that this would be technology space that would grow in importance and decided to create a team to build the solutions for what that thought would be a worthy endeavour. We’ve evolved beyond just checking the age of an online user to providing a wide range of checks on customers of age restricted sites, but it was the age checking challenge that was the start of the business – hence our name! What has been AgeChecked’s reaction to these tighter requirements for Gambling sites and how has the 24
ABOVE: Alastair Graham, CEO, AgeChecked
organisation assisted with operator’s compliance and is there more that can be done? The new requirement for age verification for free-play, free-spins etc. meant that for the first time we could offer the range of solutions that we had built for the adult content industry to the gambling industry. These lightsportsbettingoperator.com