I’ve been building enterprise software for many years, and there is a big difference between building exciting, new, leading-edge greenfield projects and building software that can support enterprise clients. Although many of the architectural patterns and practices exist in both domains, operating at scale introduces complexity that must be designed into the foundation of the software, and is outside the skillset of average developers.

At Kinectify, our platform must ingest huge volumes of data and analyze that data in near real time. One organization we engaged with projected sending more than 32M transactions per day, and there are multiple organizations that size in various stages of engaging with Kinectify. This translates to supporting millions of players and managing tens to hundreds of millions of transactions each day within our ecosystem.

When Joseph first told me about Kinectify and what he envisioned, I knew we needed to build from the ground up for scale. Ingesting and analyzing every transaction from a major organization on the Las Vegas strip is a daunting task, but ingesting every transaction from every casino in the country is something different and vastly more complicated.

We knew from the start that some of the biggest gaming companies in the world would be looking at Kinectify, and we needed to provide enterprise scalability and enterprise security while also leveraging leading-edge technology, to make Kinectify work.

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Big Data

The Kinectify platform is designed to intake huge transaction volumes from multiple properties and players and to analyze them rapidly to detect irregularities. To achieve this, we use ultra-high-throughput enterprise messaging systems capable of millions of requests per second.  This ensures continuous compliance monitoring regardless of transaction volumes. The streaming solution we are using provides real-time analytics on imported data to quicky flag issues.

Intra-service communication doesn’t stop at ingestion though, and although data streaming provides amazing capabilities in real-time analytics and throughput, it does so at the expense of enterprise messaging capabilities like dynamic message retry, attribute-based routing, and multiplexing. Therefore, we again chose the best tool for the job and implemented an Enterprise Service Bus for messaging over AMQP. This gives us the ability to dynamically recover when errors happen, and ensure that every single message we receive is processed successfully or remediated manually. In the fast-paced world of gaming operations, this ensures not just compliance and security, but also trust and reliability.

After large volumes of data make it into our platform, we use a Data Lake architecture for analytical storage purposes. This gives us the ability to deal with petabytes of data if needed and optimize storage costs. Tools Like Azure Synapse, Apache Spark, and others let us efficiently analyze the entire history to uncover hidden patterns.

Data Lakes are great for analytical purposes, but for real-time, operational data storage, few things compare to Azure CosmosDB and its ability to support near real-time geo-replication with the click of a button. This keeps hot data close to properties and enables rapid access for gaming compliance officers. It also provides the same performance experience to all our customers no matter where in the world they are.

Scalable API Architecture

An efficient compliance platform must scale elastically to maintain continuous compliance monitoring during fluctuations in activity. For example, casinos see major spikes in transactions during weekends and holidays, and specialized teams like transaction monitoring and  SAR filing teams can become particularly busy during certain time spans. Kinectify’s architecture allows rapidly scaling up monitoring to ensure no compliance data is missed during peaks. When activity decreases, the platform scales down to control costs.

The “pay only for what you use” model of cloud systems is cost efficient, but only if you maximize the utilization of the things you are deploying and discard services or scale them down when they aren’t needed. Kinectify uses the right architecture and the right tooling to solve this requirement.

Kinectify chose a service-oriented architecture to ensure we could efficiently and elastically scale the environment at the individual component level. Many solutions, especially on-premise, are monolithic and scale at the application level, forcing compliance teams to run duplicate instances of an application behind a load balancer to handle variations in traffic patterns. These monolithic systems require scaling up all of the services in the solution together (KYC, Alerts, Watchlist Monitoring, Login, Logging, etc.), while with Kinectify, only busy services like KYC scale up during peaks to avoid disruption providing rapid response times, processing speed, and cost efficiency.  

Casinos can’t afford delays in identifying suspicious activity.  Kinectify is able to scale its infrastructure up in a matter of seconds, even milliseconds with the use of Docker and Kubernetes. In Kubernetes, we enable horizontal autoscaling, allowing it to scale up containers as load increases and node servers as resources become depleted. We also dynamically scale down using these same tools, ensuring that we are utilizing as much of the computing power we have deployed as possible.  

AI/ML

Kinectify uses the latest Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) tools to build out the industry-changing Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) solutions we are delivering, which augments gaming compliance teams with advanced analytics. Generative AI solutions tools like OpenAI and custom-built models allow us to do natural language processing in our platform and allows our software to produce many of the time-consuming and complicated reports that are required for AML and Title 31 compliance.  

We leverage cloud PaaS services like Azure ML, Machine Learning Studio, and others to quickly produce custom models from the large volumes of data that we generate, and we use industry-standard tools like Juptyer Notebooks to test and evaluate the models we are creating. These tools help maximize compliance coverage.

Continuous Delivery

Slow developments and deployment cycles can leave gaming operators exposed. At Kinectify, we pride ourselves on quick builds and delivery and believe strongly that automation must be at the core of how we deliver our platform. Our infrastructure, including code, continuous integration, and continuous delivery, allows us to deliver new features to our production environment as soon as they are available, minimizing the compliance risk window from software gaps. We’ve also built in testing, security scanning, and other quality gates into our pipeline to ensure we not only deliver fast, but at the highest quality. This means our clients do not have to wait for version upgrades, they get new code seamlessly deployed in real-time continuously.  

Unlike on-premise solutions that average 1-2 yearly deployments, Kinectify schedules 26 deployments per year, updating production at least every 2 weeks. If a production issue is identified, our team can identify the source of the issue, fix the problem, and get the deployment out to the production environment in as little as 1 day. These modern deployment capabilities allow us to partner with clients and innovate in real-time together, strengthening the Kinectify offering continuously week over week.

By focusing on continuous delivery, Kinectify empowers casinos and gaming operators to respond swiftly to new compliance requirements and threats. This keeps compliance coverage continuous despite rapidly changing regulatory and cybersecurity environments.

Conclusion

As Kinectify continues to evolve, every architectural decision is meticulously evaluated to ensure that we are not just meeting but exceeding the standards in enterprise environments. By refusing to compromise on architectural integrity for the sake of expedience or cost savings, we have laid the groundwork for a platform that stands as a paragon in the gaming industry.  

Our unwavering commitment to excellence has resulted in a solution that not only addresses the immediate needs of compliance and technology officers but also anticipates the future demands of an ever-evolving industry. Our platform is built with the speed, flexibility and design of a cutting-edge startup, while providing the security, scalability, and capabilities of an established enterprise solution. This ensures our platform is not only tailored for our largest customers but is universally applicable and superior across our entire market. The result is a future-proof platform designed to make compliance easy at any scale.

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ABOUT KINECTIFY

Kinectify is an AML risk management technology company serving gaming operators both in the US and Canada. Our modern AML platform seamlessly integrates all of the organization's data into a single view and workflow empowering gaming companies to efficiently manage risk across their enterprise. In addition, Kinectify's advisory services enhance gaming operators' capacity with industry experts who can design and test programs, meet compliance deadlines, and even provide outsource services for the day-to-day administration of compliance programs.

To learn more about Kinectify and book a demo, click here.

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