The next stage of a rollout to monitor New South Wales' electronic gaming machines has given smartcard company Keycorp a AU$4 million boost.
Part of a supply contract between the TAB and Keycorp originally worth AU$20 million, the two-year deal has seen 70,000 of Keycorp's Gaming Machine Interface Cards (GMICs) installed and trialed in machines around NSW.
The success of the project has led to the TAB ordering 15,000 more of the Keycorp-designed and manufactured interface cards, to be supplied by October.
The monitoring system, called TABNet, will collect information about the money going in and the winnings coming out of gaming machines. This information will be sent to a central monitoring system, managed by a subsidiary of the TAB, Data Monitoring Services.
These figures are then forwarded to the Department of Gaming and Racing, which monitors the machines and calculates the amount of tax payable by the machine's owners.
When TABNet is up and running, it will be able to remotely monitor every poker machine in the state. Currently, this information is collected and sent manually.
The system will be operational by the end of the year, according to Rodney Pickup, manager of group commerce for the TAB.
The GMIC uses smartcard technology to encrypt information transferred between the gaming machine and the TABNet central monitoring system. The GMIC uses a secure access module (SAM) based on Keycorp's proprietary smartcard operating system, OSSCA (Operating System for Smart Card Applications).
"The SAM-based architecture is very strong," according to Rod Douglas, general manager of product development for Keycorp.
Keycorp has also done some work for gaming organisations in Hong Kong, but this area is a new market for the company's technology, which traditionally supplies financial and telecommunication companies, Douglas said. "It's a really innovative use of smartcard technology and software to create a novel solution."
