Inside Asian Gaming

September 2015 inside asian gaming 61 may have to spend millions of dollars to do the molds, so the idea was to develop something that would allow very strong modularity in our tooling system to offer new designs to our customers with an acceptable investment.” The V-Series chips are designed to offer a whole new range of versatile edge spot patterns that can be created with a choice of two different sizes of decal. “We can combine a lot of patterns together in order to make sure that we can clearly differentiate the various sets of currency, for example, the non-negotiable 1 set and non- negotiable 2 set,” says Mr Gelinotte. “It’s critical for the customers to have strong differentiation elements in the chips. Sometimes the commission rates are different between the sets, so we had to offer something very clearly customizable with differentiation elements.” Additionally, “the introduction of different sizes for the central decal makes it possible to have larger decals, thus enabling more designs and elements to be printed on the chips.” Inside Asian Gaming caught up with Mr Gelinotte during the recent Global Gaming Expo Asia in Macau to discuss other features of the new V-Series chips and GPI’s progress on the RFID front. IAG: In addition to expanding the design options of your casino currency, the new V-Series chips also incorporate new and improved materials. Can you tell us about that? Mr Gelinotte: Our customers prefer chips made with durable material, especially in Asia, where high rollers don’t like it when a chip breaks. For example, you go to the bathroom, it’s a marble floor, if you drop the chip and it breaks it’s not good luck. So that was the second goal, to develop a highly durable chip material that makes the chip difficult to break. We also added an anti-bacterial feature [known as ChipShield]. We realize chips can be a hub for germs because they are passed between multiple people and they can get very dirty. When you think about it there can be millions of germs on a chip, so another goal was to have an extra anti-bacterial feature. When a customer that’s about to open a new casino property comes to you asking for advice on their currency needs, how do you guide them? That’s where it’s good to have people with casino operations experience like Scott [McCarthy, GPI’s vice president of Sales, Asia] on board, because he knows how it works. Very often the customers are financial people, they don’t necessarily know anything about chips, so they come and ask us: “We’re going to build this number of rooms, we’ll have this number of tables, what do you think we’re going to need?” So Scott is able to use his experience in order to help the customer Tech Talk “Five years ago RFID chips were maybe 25% of our volume. Now they’re 60%. The trend really is in favor of RFID. There are very few openings that do not consider having RFID. I would say 90% of new openings are going for RFID.”