CheckFree Corporation (Nasdaq: CKFR) today announced that PinnacleSports.com, the leading international online betting and gaming company, is live with its Operational Risk Management solution, Accurate NXG, to monitor transactional risk, automate its bank account reconciliations and optimise the resolution and reporting of exceptions across its customer accounts.
Accurate NXG, originally developed by Accurate Software which was acquired by CheckFree in May 2005, has been chosen to provide an enterprise-wide operational risk management framework to enable PinnacleSports.com to manage the volume growth in the firm's online betting and gaming transactions.
CheckFree's Accurate NXG has gone live in the PinnacleSports.com operations centre in Curacao, one of the islands of the Netherlands Antilles, automating a previously semi-manual reconciliation and exception management environment. The process was time-consuming and costly, and potentially exposed the company to high levels of operational risk. By seamlessly automating the end-to-end transaction processing of payments from inception through to final resolution using a single reconciliation platform, Accurate NXG has been able to move the processing of reconciliations from an end of day to an intraday activity - from 8 hours to an average of just 45 minutes - freeing up finance executives for more value added activities.
PinnacleSports.com is using Accurate NXG across all products, including sports betting, racing and casino gaming, to reconcile transactions, resolve exceptions and provide management information reporting. The company's finance executives are also equipped with Accurate NXG's business intelligence Dashboard technology, which can be accessed remotely. The Dashboard is used across all of the PinnacleSports.com payment channels, enabling the monitoring of trends and cashflows relating to multi-currency deposits and withdrawals. The resulting extra level of transparency minimises the company's potential exposure to operational risk and reduces costs through improved operational control.
"The growth of PinnacleSports.com and of the online betting industry as a whole has been phenomenal and with this growth comes the need to build an effective operational risk management infrastructure," said Ate de Jong, chief financial officer at PinnacleSports.com. "CheckFree's experience in developing APIs has enabled easy integration with multiple payment service providers in multiple currencies to give our international customers the freedom to transact in the most convenient way they choose. By automating labour-intensive manual reconciliation and exception management processes with an advanced technology solution, CheckFree's Accurate NXG has enabled PinnacleSports.com to reduce risk across our entire organisation."
The site is currently available in 14 languages and is accessed across 80 countries making it a truly global offering. As the online betting industry has grown rapidly in recent years, PinnacleSports.com online sales channels required a greater emphasis on tightening operational control and reducing transactional risk. The site currently handles transactions through leading payments service providers, including VISA and MasterCard, as well as with payment service specialists such as NETeller, BankWire, WebMoney and Moneybookers. PinnacleSports.com plans to support additional payment methods in the near future, including FirePay, Citadel, as well as via paper cheques, and, with these services, brings an increased number of complex, multi-currency transactions.
Peter Jameson, Business Development Manager, Gaming and Leisure at CheckFree, said, "CheckFree's Accurate NXG solution offers significant benefits including improved processing, better client service and minimised risk. Through taking the time to listen and understand the challenges faced by companies in the online sector, CheckFree has built an enviable client list in the betting and gaming industry."