It’s no secret that major sporting events – like this year’s 2026 World Cup – offer operators a chance to stress-test how their systems handle record-breaking traffic across onboarding, identity verification and fraud prevention.
But what separates operators who navigate this surge smoothly, from those who don’t?
SBC Insights’ latest webinar, After the Final Whistle: World Cup Lessons and the Shift to Reusable Identity, looks to answer that question by exploring how modern identity strategies can create faster, safer and more scalable onboarding experiences – before the next boom.
In the webinar, SBC News Editor Ted Orme-Claye was joined by Daryl Huff, VP for Biometrics and Identity Technology at Jumio; Joshua Slaff, Senior Director of AML and Financial Crimes at Fanatics and Ken Soulliere, the Director of Regulatory Assurance and Player Protection at OLG.
Kicking off the conversation, Orme-Claye asked the panel what major onboarding trends they had seen coming out of the America’s market, during the World Cup.
“Events like this really test the limits of treating onboarding, fraud detection and ongoing monitoring as separate challenges,” Huff said, “often they come in, in very peak-y spikes. So a lot of scaling mechanisms simply don’t work”.
What Huff says did work for the team at Jumio, was separating “good, known, trusted users” from their consented identity user base and onboarding them separately from unknown users, who instead receive, “higher weight, the full identity verification process”.
Surge volume was also a key issue faced by operators during this year’s World Cup.
Orme-Claye asked the panel how operators dealt with these player surges, while still keeping player onboarding smooth and as frictionless as possible.
Soulliere’s response: “we were prepared”.
“You have the pre-meetings with marketing, you find out what’s the threshold,” Soulliere said, “you find out what the goal is. Is it new accounts? Is it retaining? Is it money making? Because when you focus solely on acquisition you are open to losing.”
That preparation, for Soulliere, goes all the way down the totem pole, from staffing questions, to which are the big games that weekend, allowing operators to plan ahead and allocate resources appropriately.
But as Orme-Claye points out, a seamless onboarding process means nothing if you can’t retain customers after the tournament is over.
The panel was asked how operators can turn new, incoming customers into long-term players, with Fanatics’ Slaff saying:
“It’s about having a good product, first and foremost,” Slaff said, “you can have the most beneficial to the player sign-up bonus to sign up new users, but at end of the day, if they are just looking to take advantage of that and we don’t have anything else to offer them, they’re gone.”
Slaff points out one area operators will always admit to investing heavily on is product growth, as a strong product ensures players stay on your platform and don’t migrate once the offer is over.
Watch the full webinar here.
