Kinectify fights financial crime in the gaming world with Microsoft Azure

In gangster movies from the early days of Hollywood, bad guys and their molls ran casinos and card games for nefarious purposes. It was up to the good guys to come in and put an end to the corruption and graft. Those stories were fiction, but the modern gaming industry must contend with real-life bad guys who’d use a legitimate industry for illegitimate activity. And it’s still up to the heroes to step in and thwart the attempts. 

Kinectify is an anti-money laundering (AML) risk management technology company serving gaming operators in both the US and Canada. Its modern, AI-powered AML platform integrates an organization’s data into a single view and workflow. The Kinectify platform takes in huge transaction volumes from multiple properties and players and analyzes them rapidly to detect suspicious and potentially criminal activity. Gaming companies in the US and Canada, both commercial customers and Tribal Nations, can efficiently manage risk across their enterprises. 

As Michael Calvin, Chief Technical Officer of Kinectify, says, “From a simple perspective, money laundering is about taking large amounts of money from criminal activities and making them appear legitimate.” This process not only undermines the financial integrity of gaming operations but also facilitates criminal enterprises. Ongoing risk assessment, mitigation, and stringent adherence to financial regulations are critical to enable gaming enterprises to meet strict legal compliance standards.  

If casinos, gaming rooms, and online betting sites can’t control the criminal activities taking place in their establishments, how can they possibly hope to comply with state, federal, and tribal regulations? That’s where Kinectify comes in. 

A safer gaming environment  

To manage the complex task of tracking as many as 40 million transactions across networks daily, Kinectify created a robust AML platform built on Microsoft Azure. By using managed services, Kinectify has been able to build its scalable platform without an infrastructure team. As a result, Kinectify focused its resources on feature development, including a seamless combination of Azure Cosmos DB, Azure AI Service, Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Machine Learning, and the broader capabilities of Azure cloud services. This powerhouse of data management and analysis uses the cutting-edge capabilities of Azure to integrate data points from its wide range of sources to detect suspicious activities quickly and efficiently. 

“We've known from the start that we wanted to be a cloud software as a service company,” says Calvin. “We needed to choose a platform that provided best-in-class security and compliance due to the sensitive data we require and one that also offered best-in-class services as we didn't want to be an infrastructure hosting company. We chose Azure because of its scalability, security, and the immense support it offers in terms of infrastructure management," says Calvin.  

The Kinectify platform ingests large volumes of highly sensitive, personally identifiable information and then generates highly sensitive data about a player’s behavior, risk, and potential suspicious activity. “As you can imagine,” says Calvin, “criminals who are trying to launder money through gaming organizations would certainly like to know what data is collected on them and what behaviors are being monitored. They would even like to impede the organization’s ability to monitor them, making the Kinectify platform a target for hackers and malicious software. Kinectify takes cybersecurity very seriously and employs all the tools available to us to provide a secure environment for our customer’s data.” 

Azure Kubernetes Service is the key component for ingesting data, helping manage workloads and services. A powerful and flexible tool, Kubernetes offers automatic scaling that can accommodate spikes in usage and enables Kinectify to conserve resources by using containers to run multiple applications at the same time.  

At the heart of Kinectify’s solution is Azure Cosmos DB, a fully managed NoSQL and relational database for AI app development that provides the scalability and single-digit millisecond response times needed to handle massive volumes of transactional data across multiple regions. "Azure Cosmos DB supports our operational data storage with minimal latency, which is crucial for the real-time analysis needed to identify suspicious transactions," says Calvin.  

Kinectify uses Azure OpenAI Service for its large language model use cases of producing executive summaries of investigations and creating government filings, especially Suspicious Activity Reports. Azure AI extends the capabilities of the Kinectify platform by integrating advanced machine learning (ML) algorithms that analyze transaction patterns and detect anomalies indicative of money laundering. This AI layer processes the data stored in Azure Cosmos DB, employing sophisticated models that evolve to match changing criminal tactics.  

Calvin says, “Data is ingested into Kinectify and processed using services running in Azure Kubernetes Service. It is then stored directly in Azure Cosmos DB to serve as the primary data source for our presentation layer. We then move the data into our analytical store, Microsoft Fabric, and analyze the data for business intelligence purposes. The data also trains AI models to enhance our product. The services that make up this operational, analytics, and AI/ML Ops pipeline could not be more integrated or seamless.” 

An agile service model to support an evolving industry  

Kinectify's choice to build on the Azure managed service models offers significant advantages for the company. These services reduce the need for extensive infrastructure management, allowing Kinectify to focus on innovation and core business functions without the overhead of maintaining physical servers or hardware. With services that are tightly integrated with each other, Kinectify can quickly evaluate and adopt best-in-class, leading-edge solutions in Azure as they become available to the public. This rapid deployment is crucial for staying ahead in the fast-paced world of gaming compliance.  

"Because we use Azure services, Kinectify can provide agile delivery, rapidly deploying changes, enhancements, and bug fixes to our environment at a rate that on-premises solutions cannot match,” says Calvin. "We send out new features and enhancements to our environment every two weeks and can update with bug fixes in near real time.” 

"With Azure AI, we automate complex parts of the investigation and due diligence processes, enhancing our efficiency and accuracy in spotting potential threats," says Calvin. Implementing the Kinectify Azure-powered solution has led to remarkable improvements in security and operational efficiency within the gaming industry. "We’ve detected 43 percent more suspicious activities and achieved 96 percent faster decisioning with our Azure-based platform,” says Calvin. “We’ve been able to slash disposition time from nearly 13 minutes to just over 3 minutes per alert—and the industry average is 60 to 90 minutes per alert. Also, we have lowered investigative time to 45 minutes from the previous average of 6 to 8 hours per review and completely automated risk scoring across more than 500,000 players.” These enhancements not only streamline compliance with regulatory requirements but also strengthen the gaming establishments against abuse.  

Kinectify is a graduate of Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub, a program designed to accelerate startup growth with AI. Founders Hub provides free access to AI models through Azure, along with other support and services, including one-on-one guidance from Microsoft experts. “Founders Hub jumpstarted our relationship with Microsoft,” says Calvin. “We’ve been surprised by the level of partnership we've received from Microsoft, beyond even the programs that offer credits for exploring services in Azure. "  

Looking forward, Kinectify is poised to expand its use of predictive analytics and further integrate AI capabilities from Azure to anticipate and prevent fraudulent activities before they occur. The scalability of Azure ensures that as Kinectify grows, its solution remains robust and responsive across an expanding customer base and geographical reach. 

Kinectify, with its sophisticated AML platform, exemplifies how technology can be employed to safeguard the gaming industry from the risks of money laundering. Through its innovative use of Azure managed services, Kinectify tackles today’s challenges and prepares the industry to meet future threats, helping ensure gaming remains safe and legal.