All Access Granted

In 1981, a company called BMM Testlabs was founded in Australia to take on a task no one was doing at the time—testing and certifying gaming equipment via a private laboratory. At the time, testing and certification was done mainly through government-operated labs.

BMM was the first independent testing lab in the gaming industry, founded eight years before testing professionals from the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement formed the company that would become Gaming Laboratories International. Shortly after that first competitor appeared, BMM triggered its own rapid growth with a single contract that showcased its expertise and ultimately defined the potential of independent labs.

In 1992, the Australian state of Victoria established a gaming regulator, and tapped BMM Testlabs to write the regulations and craft Australia’s first set of technical standards for casino slot machines and systems.

“After that, the Australian governments all went to independent labs over a period of time,” recalls Martin Storm, president and CEO of the international company now known as BMM Innovation Group (BIG). Storm acquired BMM in 2002, and within a few years, moved the company’s headquarters to Las Vegas, where it remains today. He has spent the past 23 years growing the company—navigating crises from the 2008-2009 global financial crisis to Covid-19, while driving international expansion into 16 countries.

Now, BMM is at another crossroads, with private equity firm The Visualize Group having agreed to acquire 60 percent of BMM Innovation Group in a deal expected to close in Q1 2026. Storm, however, will remain the company’s CEO after the deal closes, and with good reason: BMM has just reached a milestone in North America, and is poised for more major expansion into new markets.

“When I bought the company, I restructured the ownership and made it a U.S.-based company,” Storm says. “We’ve just been following the market as it emerged fully. We went to South Africa in 2005. We went to Peru, Spain and Austria in 2007. We went to Macau in 2008, and Singapore after that. We continued expanding to the point where we’ve got 16 countries running 16 labs, covering the global gaming market based on market demand.”

On September 30, BMM announced it has achieved full access to the U.S. Class III market for the first time, prompting double-digit growth in its land-based testing and certification business, and completing its ability to service U.S. and Canadian gaming markets.

“Completing full U.S. Class III access was a huge achievement for BMM,” said BMM Testlabs President, Land-Based Gaming & Inspections Kirk White at the time. “It opens the door for a new era of growth and leadership in land-based gaming.”

The announcement prompted the company to use this year’s Global Gaming Expo to kick off BMM Innovation Group’s “2025-2026 World Tour.”

“As we begin our World Tour, we are committed to powering our customers’ growth and protecting their brands in every market globally,” said White.

Storm says the U.S. Class III access takes BMM to the next level. “It’s a fantastic thing,” he says. “There are primarily two parts of the land-based market in the U.S.—the Class III casino gaming product and the Class II, tribal-related bingo-driven product. We’ve been competing in the Class II market for 15 years, because the jurisdictions were easier to enter. But for Class III, we had to address more than 300 jurisdictions for the U.S. and Canada.

“It’s taken me over 20 years and more than $20 million for us to get those jurisdictions in place, and I had to go in there and fight pretty hard in a few jurisdictions. So, what this milestone means to us is that we can now go to IGT, Aristocrat, Light & Wonder, and any other land-based gaming company in the world, and we can offer to test their Class III games for every jurisdiction in North America. In Australia, it’s easy; there are only half a dozen jurisdictions. But in America, in Canada, there are over 300, and if you can’t do them all, you are seriously limited.”

Storm acknowledges that BMM is facing entrenched competition in the U.S., but says his company is ready to compete. “We’ve employed a lot of people and grown a very big company just waiting for this moment,” he says. “Now that we’ve gotten here, we are going to compete openly, and it’s up to the customer to decide who they want. We think that in every market, if there are only two suppliers, they are probably going to balance out the workload. So we think that we are going to go from 0 percent 20 years ago to 50 percent in the next couple of years.”

Diversified Services

What BIG is calling its World Tour—starting with G2E, and proceeding to ICE, SBC Summit Rio, the Indian Gaming Tradeshow, G2E Asia, and other events on the gaming calendar—is about much more than just land-based gaming testing. It is meant to demonstrate the diversified services and expertise the company has developed as it has matured into a global force.

BMM Testlabs was quick to embrace online testing even before iGaming and sports betting took off in the U.S. The company’s longtime experience in digital testing prepared it to handle the U.S. surge in iGaming. In fact, in the first half of 2025, BMM’s digital business has grown nearly three times faster than the broader iGaming and sports betting market, building on seven consecutive years of record growth.

“The iGaming side is three times faster, but it’s coming off a smaller base,” says Storm. “The land-based business has been around a long time, and it’s growing at about 4 percent (annually). The iGaming market is growing at 11 percent or 12 percent, and we are growing much, much faster than that. Also, there’s less testing required there. You’re not doing any hardware; you’re not doing a lot that you do in a land-based environment. Still, it’s really important that labs test iGaming product properly and fully.”

Beyond testing, the BIG Group helps its clients with the larger responsibility of compliance in the various jurisdictions. “Testing is the first part of compliance,” Storm says. “The other thing we do is sit with clients to discuss their plans to meet the requirements of the jurisdiction. There’s no point building a product that does not meet all of the requirements. We want them to know what needs to be done to build it.”

The other side of BIG’s compliance expertise is helping regulators. “We help gaming regulators with technology, understanding what customers are doing with their products,” says Storm. “There are a lot of new products being introduced in the market. We have to explain them to the regulators. We go to a lot of trouble on the regulatory side and the compliance side to make sure regulators understand the products, and how the products fit into their regs. With regulators, we spend a great deal of time offering free training for their staff, either onsite at our BMM Training Center, or at their facilities.”

Protecting Clients, Players

Other services in BIG’s expanded portfolio include cybersecurity in the form of the BIG Cyber division, and a popular program to promote responsible gaming, RG24seven Virtual Training.

BIG Cyber helps clients maximize their preparation for and response to the cyberattacks that have been on the rise for the past few years. “There’s nobody who’s not going to get hit (with a cyberattack),” Storm says. “We have a partnership with a fantastic company called CYREBRO. With them, we do managed services, detection services and more.”

BIG Cyber has a managed cybersecurity operations center using CYREBRO technology, which is AI-based. “We go to our customers who are interested and talk to them about how we can protect them,” says Storm. “We took some of our skills in security testing for the digital environment and applied them to penetration tests. Internally, with our own experts, we do security audits, we do penetration tests, and we do PCI:DSS evaluations. Another important service we offer in cybersecurity is a program of risk management assessments with our excellent partner Maxxsure.

“We sit down with customers and work through their risk profile. Where are they most likely to be attacked, and why? We advise them to invest and mitigate in those areas first.”

RG24seven has an increasingly popular library of virtual training offering expert-led, compliance-grade courses This turnkey training provides the most current information on Responsible Gaming, Anti-Money Laundering, Human Trafficking Awareness and other topics associated with land-based and online casino operations. “We understood from within BMM itself that people learn better watching on video, and they retain that information,” Storm says. “We give them tests at the end of each chapter of training. We are able to educate people much faster using that kind of paradigm.”

According to Storm, RG24seven has logged thousands of users representing casinos, gaming commissions, lotteries, regulators, and suppliers all over the world. “My guess is that we’ll have 1 million users of our content in the future,” he says. “We’ve got the biggest casino operators in the world using the videos. We’ve got gaming regulators all over the world. We’ve got manufacturers all over the world. We’ve got tribal regulators and operators throughout the United States. It’s a fantastic, packaged product.

“We’ve got to protect the public, protect the patrons—otherwise we won’t have an industry in the future. And we’ve got to make sure that everybody performs to the highest levels. Good education is a critical part of that. People who come into this industry can take a few years to learn everything, but we can teach them in a couple of months everything they need to know and give them a strong base for learning going forward.”

The latest development for RG24seven is RG-ONE, a new package offering a condensed version of training videos for gaming company employees, for orientation and to be taken yearly by every staff member. “We’ve taken hours of content and turned it into one hour of very scripted, carefully crafted content,” Storm explains. “So, somebody can do an induction into the gaming industry in one hour, and at the end of that induction, they’ll get a certificate. We think that’s important because, when a company makes a mistake, we’ve seen that regulators ask the operator, what training did you give your staff? We need to make sure everybody gets training, so we’ve produced RG-ONE to ensure that employees stay informed throughout their career.”

The virtual training, which has content certified by BMM Testlabs, goes beyond problem gambling awareness to include training on human trafficking awareness, anti-money laundering, and much more.

Branching Out

In addition to expanding its products and services, BIG is expanding geographically. In addition to its full access to U.S. Class III markets, the company has secured a license to provide its services in Brazil, for iGaming, sports betting and VLTs, and stands ready to serve the land-based market that eventually will emerge in that country.

“Brazil went straight into sports betting and online gaming, so we’ve got a lot of business in that area,” Storm explains. “The government hasn’t passed land-based legislation, but they’ve created a VLT market, with physical machines connected to the cloud (and a central server). They’ve created opportunity for themselves to keep growing, so we’ve established a lab in São Paulo, and we’ve got people there testing.”

Another function of the São Paulo lab is a new business called TestFly, dedicated to testing games outside of the gambling realm. “It specializes in video gaming testing, so companies like Microsoft for Xbox, Sony, PlayStation, EA Sports and Netflix can have their non-money games tested.”

Elsewhere in South America, BIG has offices in Peru and Argentina, and BMM wrote the standards for the Chile gaming market.

The company also was one of the first licensed in the emerging United Arab Emirates market.

Looking forward, BIG’s combination with The Visualize Group will provide opportunity for further growth. “Like all acquisitions in gaming, our prospective investor and partner has to get licensed,” says Storm. “They are right now going through the licensing phase, after which we can start working together in a more formal way. That’s all going well.”

He says the combination of BIG and The Visualize Group will open the door to more expansion of services. “I’ve been really ambitious with BMM in the past 10 years, and there have been a lot of things we would like to add to our portfolio of services but require more resources and additional expertise. We think our new partner brings that to the table. We chose them because we thought they were the best fit for what our vision of the company is.”

That vision? “Grow the core business, which is testing and certification, and add new solutions across land-based and digital markets,” Storm says. “The BIG companies (BMM Testlabs, BIG Cyber and RG24seven Virtual Training) reinforce the BIG Group’s mission to transform gambling industry compliance and protect all who gamble.”