Quick Intro
Coolbet is a global iGaming platform, covering areas like sportsbook, casino, and live gaming across 8 markets. With a diverse team of more than 400 specialists, Coolbet continues to scale, concentrating on maintaining services that are built on trust, entertainment, and responsible play. Operating in a highly competitive and strictly regulated industry, Coolbet requires strong measures that keep its players safe, and at the same time, ensure that player onboarding is Know Your Customer (KYC)-compliant, yet smooth and simple.
While this seems like a fairly simple, standard process, Coolbet’s team understood the importance of this very first step from the end-user’s point of view: either they register smoothly and access Coolbet’s products, or abandon the verification process without actually finishing the registration. At the end of the day, Coolbet’s goal always remained the same. They needed to let real players in without friction while detecting bypassing attempts and fraudulent users as quickly as possible — all without compromising the overall user experience.
Key Challenges
Being a highly established industry leader since its start in 2016, Coolbet is responsible for thousands of players in different markets. Poker, live casinos, sports betting events, and other engaging games are only a small portion of Coolbet’s offerings. With this large selection and the general fact that iGaming products, unfortunately, attract fraudsters, Coolbet always emphasizes compliance, player protection, and operational integrity as its core business values.
For Coolbet, that meant issues like bonus abuse and fraudulent attempts to complete the identity verification process to access its multi-category iGaming and gambling services were not just buzzwords, but the reality. The key issue with the previous provider was a persistently low KYC acceptance rate that fell short compared to industry standards.
“Instead of sustainably making player onboarding more efficient, our onboarding process was affected by the growing user volumes, which created unnecessary delays,” explained Andreas, Fraud Operations Lead at Coolbet.
Even though the ID verification flow was mainly automated, it still required an increasing number of manual reviews. Coolbet’s team naturally then started to question the system’s integrity: “Our compliance team started to spend too much time on manual reviews. In our case, and due to the competitive market, every extra step impacted conversions,” added Andreas.
The previous verification service didn’t just slow Coolbet and its team down. It directly impacted conversions by introducing friction at one of the most sensitive steps of the user journey, the account registration stage. Players who encountered delays were more likely to abandon the process entirely. Additionally, the lack of flexibility and limited options to adjust verification flows directly impacted Coolbet’s ability to optimize the age verification process, along with other industry-specific challenges, such as duplicate account detection.
“We needed a new identity verification solution, one that helped manage iGaming-specific risks, and one that could actually adapt to how we operate through more tailored onboarding options,” said Andreas, Fraud Operations Lead at Coolbet.
The Solution
With thousands of users needing verification daily, Coolbet wanted to improve its existing identity verification process. Simply because the risk of a backlog and genuine players waiting in line to get verified and access their services was not something Coolbet wanted to experience.
“Our acceptance rate was consistently below what we’d expect for the markets we operate in. But the bigger concern was that the system could be gamed. We couldn’t trust the automated verification results,” explained Andreas, Fraud Operations Lead at Coolbet.
Second-guessing verification results was not ideal, so the bar was set high when Coolbet started to assess and look for a new KYC service provider, mainly focusing on:
- A high KYC accuracy rate
- Wide ID document coverage
- Easy integration into the existing workflow
- Industry-adapted onboarding workflows
- Complete automation for all KYC-related processes
Coolbet aimed to minimize the manual workflow for in-house specialists and switch to new software, which would deliver fewer false positives. At the same time, the goal was to ensure a frictionless sign-up experience for Coolbet’s players, despite the fact that regulators demand a strict KYC flow, both with government ID and address checks.
As a result, Coolbet integrated iDenfy’s identity verification service, along with the following features:
- KYC verification to ensure accurate, instant government-issued ID document checks and biometric verification with liveness checks and cross-matching.
- Address verification to automate Proof of Address (PoA) checks and confirm player residency while supporting geo-compliance across Coolbet’s operating markets.
- Custom mismatch tag mapping to automatically forward higher-risk, flagged users to the “manual queue”, where compliance specialists could review edge cases more efficiently.
Another important factor that Coolbet appreciated was that iDenfy’s team actively collaborated and was willing to make adjustments, such as optimizing the verification workflow based on Coolbet’s risk management and overall user experience requirements. “Most of the configuration happened directly in the iDenfy back office, which meant we didn’t need to mobilize a development team to get things set up,” noted Andreas, Fraud Operations Lead at Coolbet.
“What iDenfy instantly gave us was the ability to trust our own onboarding process again. When your compliance team has confidence in the system, multiple pieces, like operational changes and player experience, connect and simply work better,” commented Andreas.
The Implementation
Coolbet integrated iDenfy’s API using a fully customizable verification flow, which was successfully embedded directly into their existing player onboarding process.
This enables personal information cross-matching against the ID document the player subsequently submits, triggering mismatch detection automatically if the data doesn’t align. Such an approach helped Coolbet maintain its branding and a seamless UX, rather than redirecting players to an overly complex, mult-step KYC journey, which could leave the process with the same result: drop-offs.
“The API was well-documented, and the integration was time-saving for our team, which meant we could focus on other tasks as well and not think about rebuilding everything from scratch,” explained Andreas, Fraud Operations Lead at Coolbet.
Why iDenfy?
Coolbet integrated iDenfy due to several reasons:
✔️ Proven experience in serving iGaming platforms
✔️ Easy communication with the team
✔️ High accuracy rates for different workflows
✔️ One solution for PoA and ID document checks
✔️ Fast onboarding and age verification
The Results
Before iDenfy, Coolbet was experiencing a high number of false positives, which meant that legitimate players were being flagged, along with low-risk users who could have been onboarded, were forwarded to the manual review section. As a result, overall approval rates were lower than expected, creating unnecessary friction in the onboarding process. For compliance teams, the manual double-checking was a hassle as well.
Since partnering with iDenfy, Coolbet’s KYC conversions increased by 31%, reaching a consistent 87% success rate, which is above the iGaming industry average, and has remained stable throughout the whole collaboration.
Other notable achievements:
- 2x more verifications handled with accuracy using automation instead of manual reviews.
- Increased trust in the software’s abilities, with Coolbet’s in-house compliance teams no longer needing to second-guess automated verification results.
- Freed internal resources for high-risk, priority cases, lowering the overall time spent on manual reviews.
- Stronger fraud prevention, with the ability to detect duplicate accounts, underage users, and fraudulent attempts to bypass the KYC system.
With a customized, dual-layer (ID doc + PoA) onboarding process, Coolbet started to scale more sustainably, focusing only on edge cases, while iDenfy’s automation handled the majority of verifications. Such a change instantly showed changes, resulting in a better experience for genuine players who completed the verification process within the first attempt and gained access to Coolbet’s services in under 60 seconds on average.
“Switching to iDenfy has significantly reduced the volume of manual verifications, supporting our conversion and player retention rates across all markets,” said Andreas, Fraud Operations Lead at Coolbet.
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