Highlights from an Insider's Perspective
Gaming Associates recently hosted a webinar bringing together three of the industry’s most experienced voices in gaming regulation and compliance: Dr. Aftab Rizvi, Founder and CEO of Gaming Associates; Roger Parkes, Director of Regulatory Affairs at Gaming Associates; and Mark D’Andrea, Principal Consultant at Gaming Associates. Together, they traced the real history behind today’s compliance standards, from the industry’s earliest days to where testing is headed next.
Where It All Began:
1998
Dr. Aftab Rizvi opened the conversation by revisiting 1998, when he was brought in to help certify Lasseters Online, a project that became the world’s first government-regulated online casino. At the time, there was no rulebook and no precedent anywhere to draw from. Over 18 months, Dr. Aftab Rizvi and his team produced the Technical Functional Requirement, the first formal standard for online gaming testing.
“We were not applying a standard,” Dr. Aftab Rizvi reflected. “We were writing it.”
He also spoke about the hardest lesson he learned building trust across jurisdictions:
“Being right will win you an argument. Being trusted is what wins you the room.”
Moving Between Regulator and Operator
Roger Parkes brought a perspective few others in the industry can offer, having worked on both sides of the regulatory relationship throughout his career. He described starting as a regulator in New Zealand, later working across the UK Gambling Commission and the Alderney Gambling Control Commission, and holding compliance leadership roles at Betfair and Betway.
Roger Parkes spoke candidly about what that dual perspective revealed, describing how cross-pollination between regulatory and operational roles helps both sides build a stronger understanding of one another’s priorities.
He also reflected on his experience helping build a gambling regulatory framework in the UAE from the ground up, a process Roger Parkes described simply:
“Everything was being questioned and everything was being tested.”
From Assembly Code to Modern RNG Testing
Mark D’Andrea offered a firsthand account of how dramatically testing itself has changed. He began his career in 1997 inside Queensland’s government test lab, testing gaming machine software written in assembly language.
“I think some of the vibe coders of today,” Mark D’Andrea noted, “would find that quite a task.”
He also shared a personal full-circle moment: as a regulator in the UK, Mark D’Andrea was part of the team that approved the country’s first wave of independent test labs in 2007, including Gaming Associates, the organisation he would later join as a consultant.
On why online testing had to evolve differently from land-based gambling, he was direct:
“You can’t lock an online system down to the same degree as land-based gambling.”
Looking Ahead: AI and the Future of Testing
All three speakers were asked how artificial intelligence is changing the way games and RNGs are tested. Dr. Aftab Rizvi described AI as increasingly embedded within the systems being tested, adding:
“AI in compliance is not about replacing judgment. It’s about giving human judgment far better evidence to work with.”
Mark D’Andrea offered a similar view of RNG testing specifically: “
RNGs have always been a bit of a dark art,” he said, describing how AI could help testers augment their own expertise in identifying weaknesses.
A Shared Thread
Despite three very different career paths, the conversation returned again and again to one shared idea: trust in gaming is not something that gets certified once and then coasts on reputation. As Dr. Aftab Rizvi put it:
“Trust is not something you certify once. It is something you renew every single day.”
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