Aurum has totally changed the status quo in finance of doing everything at month end. We can report financial figures quicker, we understand how PSPs are performing at the moment, and we can see issues faster.‍

In the iGaming industry, inspiration can be found in abundance given the vast numbers of operators. However, only by taking inspiration from those that innovate will result in success. 

Glitnor Group was mindful of this when working to improve its financial operations, and having invested in PlayStar, a US-based startup casino, it spotted a blueprint for success. 

PlayStar partnership and US launch  

As an upcoming casino operating in New Jersey, PlayStar recognised early on that they would need a robust reconciliation in place to match their ambitions of scaling rapidly. They therefore opted to deploy Aurum, guaranteeing them complete visibility of player deposits and withdrawals plus additional benefits such as daily player transaction journalling.  

In addition, their Financial Controller, Matthew Abela, achieved his aim of streamlining their operations by bringing them fully in-house rather than hiring accountants across the globe and running up a high FTE cost. As a result, with Aurum his team came to work more efficiently and report figures in a shorter time frame. 

PlayStar has a strong finance function thanks to systems like Aurum, so the decision was made that by introducing Aurum to Glitnor, they too could build a robust financial operation.

‍Matthew Abela, Senior Financial Controller, Glitnor Group 

Merger and acquisition of Glitnor and PlayStar 

Following Glitnor Group acquiring 39.4% of PlayStar, the combined finance team was introduced to a new financial challenge to conquer. Whilst mergers and acquisitions are a great way to grow business in the iGaming industry, they also result in a pressing need for robust and scalable systems. Transactional volumes will grow, additional PSPs are likely, and the possibility of payments from across different regions of the world must be considered. 

The merged finance teams therefore had to ensure that the financial operations of both PlayStar and Glitnor - individually and as a collective group - would work efficiently, even when factoring in the various considerations that a significant merger and acquisition creates. 

With Glitnor Group having no scalable accounting software in place but PlayStar experiencing proven success with Aurum, it was clear that automated reconciliation was the way forward for the group. However, being a new finance function at Glitnor Group, Matthew’s peers were initially sceptical. Nevertheless, “we [he and his team] really pushed for Aurum, reflecting how much we [they] believe in the software.” 

Although Aurum is not a revenue generating tool, in time we managed to get buy-in from the group thanks to them recognising the immediate value of having a low overhead cost, more robust internal controls, greater scalability, and enabling the finance team to be freed from the boring repetitive task of reconciliation and instead do more engaging work.

‍Matthew Abela, Senior Financial Controller, Glitnor Group 

The results 

On becoming one finance team with Aurum at their joint disposal but also tailored to their individual market requirements, Glitnor Group and PlayStar have since both experienced a whole roster of benefits across their PSP and bank reconciliations, plus their journalling. 

For starters, subsequent to adopting Aurum, Glitnor Group instantly saw an uptick in accuracy despite handling millions of transactions. The primary driver behind this was the end-to-end automation that Aurum provides. With the ETL of data sources, reconciliation, notification of exceptions, and journal file creation all being automated, any possibility of human error is completely removed from the reconciliation process. 

However, to get to this point, human intervention during the initial implementation of Aurum was required. Just like automation though, Matthew also found no fault in this, namely thanks to the commitment of the Aurum team to go above and beyond. An example of this was the team manually testing the processes they had designed alongside Matthew before rolling them out in an automated manner. 

The Aurum team are great problem solvers who are completely committed to helping you and making sure your project works at all costs.

‍Matthew Abela, Senior Financial Controller, Glitnor Group 

As a result, everything now runs quicker for Glitnor Group. Elimination of human error means that time isn’t wasted on rectifying mistakes; time is no longer spent on manually ingesting huge files of data via their laptops and waiting for them to crash; and exceptions are spotted daily rather than piling up. 

The sum of all this time saved every single day for Glitnor Group is an engaged team who can deliver added value rather than working on rote tasks such as reconciliation. Crucially, when it comes to month-end, Aurum in fact managed to substantially decrease closing time as tasks are now done daily rather than during month-end. 

Aurum has totally changed the status quo in finance of doing everything at month end. Instead, tasks are shifted to during the month as the time spent on things is miniscule. Reconciling daily stops unreconciled items piling up and allows us to look at the data as it’s happening. We can report financial figures quicker, we understand how PSPs are performing at the moment, and we can see issues faster thanks to Aurum.‍

Matthew Abela, Senior Financial Controller, Glitnor Group 

Moreover, even outside of the reconciliation process, Aurum assists Glitnor Group. For starters, there is the closely related matter of exception management, made easier for the team by Aurum notifying them of all outstanding items at a set time. Plus, with Aurum being the no.1 reconciliation software in the iGaming industry, its vast library of connections means that it is also applicable for other purposes beyond reconciliation. In the case of Glitnor Group, it has offered them an additional solution of funnelling player transactions from their backend platform, directly into their accounting system, saving them time on manual data loading and revenue and player liability journalling. 

With the Aurum scheduler, we can set PSPs, player transactions, and journalling to be reconciled and processed before we begin work so when we start the day we only have to focus on the investigations of discrepancies.

‍Matthew Abela, Senior Financial Controller, Glitnor Group 

Ultimately, having revolutionised PlayStar’s financial operations to the point that it became the inspiration for Glitnor Group to reinvent their own, Aurum has now securely made Glitnor Group’s finance function scalable for additional growth. 

With Aurum, expansion into new PSPs, brands, and markets is not as manual and labour intensive because our financial operations are now scalable and can be adapted as the business evolves over time – exactly what we wanted. ‍

Matthew Abela, Senior Financial Controller, Glitnor Group 

Moreover, with Glitnor Group's imminent acquisition of another operator, Aurum will soon have been implemented three times in the space of just 1.5 years, reflecting the great success both Glitnor and PlayStar finance teams are experiencing in partnership with Aurum Solutions.