George Rover, former deputy director at the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement, has offered his perspective on getting licensed in the state during a webinar hosted by Geocomply Solutions aimed at potential European entrants to the US betting market post-PASPA.
In a bid to assuage fears over what many view as a monumental challenge to obtain a licence, Rover advised: “What I tell people from outside the US is that it appears to be very daunting to follow an application in the US and it is very intrusive. Having said all of that, when they understand the process and get past those initial disclosure forms which can take some time to fill out if its the first time you’re trying to organise your finances and figure out where you’ve lived for the last 15 years, you will find it’s fairly straightforward.”
The former deputy, when quizzed over the timing of a licence application, responded: “New Jersey has something in place called the transactional waiver where once you submit what they call a completed application, and have all the forms required to be filed, with the appropriate fingerprints, the division rather quickly – many times within 30 to 35 days – will issue a transactional waiver to the applicant which allows them to immediately engage in whatever activity they would like to engage in within the gaming market.
“And the long term plenary or full investigation of the company may not occur until literally a year or more later.So they have a process where you can get up and running fairly quickly once you have submitted your application.”
According to Rover, once the waiver has been awarded, a full licence usually follows. “When the division does its investigation before issuing the transactional waiver they do their own look up generally of a company. They ping all the relevant law enforcement and regulatory agencies around the world and, quite frankly, I can’t think of a case off hand when I was at the division when we granted an entity a transactional waiver and did not ultimately license the entity. Having said that I do have to point out one thing – it does not mean that there might not be a person or particular persons who, in the end result, were not able to establish their own suitability. But the entity itself normally always gets a full plenary licence.”
