The scope is the whole substance of a mark

An examination is a bounded piece of work. It covers a named subject, against a written scheme, at a point in time, and everything outside that boundary is untouched by the certificate. Sample 3 buys an examination of one of the operator’s thirty-seven documented processes.

Open the partner account Run the four questions

Mark stub

Audit fee: 6,400.00 a year
Processes covered: 1 of 37 = 2.7%
Documents in the file: 12
Of those published: 0

the issuerThe company or body that put the mark there - a testing house, an association, a review platform or a media brand

the scopeWhat the examination covered: a process, a system, a game type, one entity or one market

the recourseWhat the issuer does when the operator fails - the question almost no mark answers

Direct answerAn examination covers a named subject against a written scheme, and a certificate is a statement about that subject only. In this sample the examination covers one of thirty-seven documented processes, the report is one of twelve documents in the compliance file, and none of the twelve is published - so the mark displays the existence of an audit, not its content.

Five ways a scope is limited

A narrow examination is not dishonesty, and a testing house that examined everything would be prohibitively expensive. The difficulty is that the certificate and the badge rarely carry the boundary with them, so a reader supplies their own assumption - and the assumption is always “everything”.

By subject

One process, one system or one game type. A payment process can be examined without the account-opening process, the complaints process or the marketing process being looked at once.

By entity

One company. A group running five brands on several licences is several companies, and an examination of one of them says nothing about the others - though the badge is usually placed on the shared page.

By jurisdiction

One regulated market. The same brand can be served by different companies to different countries, so an examination attached to one market’s company does not describe the service a reader in another country is using.

By date

A point in time or a period. A certificate is current for a stated time, and what is displayed is often the most recent one rather than the current one - a difference of a single line on the certificate.

What an audit costs, and what it buys

The cost of an examination is a fee, and a fee is an expense that has to be justified like any other. That is the honest way to read the arithmetic: a mark is a marketing purchase whose return can be measured, which is why operators buy the examined kind and the bought kind with the same calculation.

Sample 3 - the fee against the return it is meant to produceaudit fee, a year                                    6,400.00
page views carrying the mark                     1,200,000
registrations at 4.0%                               48,000
first deposits at 20.0% of registrations             9,600
a 3.0% relative lift on the deposit step    9,600 x 0.03 = 288
margin per depositor, illustrative                    40.00
value of the lift                          288 x 40 = 11,520.00
return on the fee                        11,520 / 6,400 = 1.8x
fee per thousand page views              6,400 / 1,200 = 5.33

Read that as a purchase, not as a finding. The examination is real and the fee is real, but the reason the mark is on the page is that it is expected to return more than it cost. That is not a criticism of the issuer or the operator; it is the reason a reader should treat a mark as a marketing object whose content has to be checked separately.

What the report covers that the mark does not

Inside the report

The scheme, the subject, the sample tested, the method, the findings, the corrective actions the operator agreed, the date and the entity. A report is a document with an argument in it, and it is usually the property of the operator who paid for it.

Inside the mark

A badge, a caption of a few words, sometimes a certificate number and an expiry, and a link to the issuer’s homepage rather than to the finding. The report is the object with content in it; the mark is the object on the page.

That gap is why the second question on this desk is “what did it examine” rather than “is there an audit”. The existence of an examination is nearly always true and nearly always uninformative. The scope is the part that changes what the mark is worth, and the scope is the part that has to be asked for.