A two-way anonymous conversation: inside Savvy Games Group's launch

Building a compliance program from zero

Savvy Games Group is a global champion of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund for games and esports, dedicated to building a vibrant ecosystem for sustainable industry growth and opportunity. Its portfolio includes Scopely, ESL FACEIT Group, and Riyadh-based Steer Studios.

Dhia Daoud, SVP, Head of Risk & Compliance, built the compliance program from the ground up. It started with policies, and the whistleblower policy was among the first. Then came the harder part: a channel behind it.

Outgrowing the first version of the program

The team's first reporting channel was a mailbox and an anonymous Microsoft Form. It generated real cases,but not enough to earn full trust, and was built to take a report once, with no way for the compliance team to follow up.

"There were concerns about the anonymity of the process, and that we might have IT tools to figure out who the whistleblower was," says Dhia Daoud, SVP, Head of Risk & Compliance at Savvy Games Group.

After about a year and a half on the initial setup, the team had enough of a track record to see its own gaps. Dhia went looking for something built for the job.

"We wanted to explore what tools were out there in the market and not rely on workarounds that we had done in-house. It was important to give the comfort internally that the reporting system was truly independent and anonymous," says Dhia.

What mattered in the evaluation

Dhia and his team ran the evaluation themselves, choosing the system they would use daily.

Three factors mattered most in that decision: "I would say three elements. The first is functionality, whether it satisfies our requirements. Second, to be simple and easy for users. And third, the price," says Dhia.

For Dhia's team, functionality meant adding elements that the old setup could never deliver: anonymity people actually trusted, and a way to keep talking to someone after they went quiet.

The process needed to be simple and work at both ends: straightforward for a whistleblower filing a report via a range of channels (Web, Mobile App, and Phone), and workable for the team handling the cases behind it. SpeakUp Report cleared all three.

"Having a good price but not a good solution is not a good way to choose. The demo was very impressive, and it offers all the functionalities we wanted," he says.

Dhia weighed the working relationship too. "This relationship is very important to us, and that is what made SpeakUp stand out in our selection criteria".

Getting live

In May 2026, Savvy went live with the workflow and configuration the compliance team had specified. SpeakUp's onboarding team helped build it out.

The compliance team announced the new reporting channels to every employee at Savvy, by email and on the group intranet. Dhia believes that a one-time announcement is not enough, so continuous training and awareness sessions will be planned, so employees see how reporting through the SpeakUp tool can help create a work environment where integrity can thrive.

What the team can do now

"The good part is that we are now able to communicate with the whistleblower. That was a big change," says Dhia.

"It gives us the tools to reach out to these people, to understand more, to get evidence, much more than a one-way set up like Microsoft Forms."

HR and internal audit are now shared users of the whistleblowing workflow, rather than colleagues that Dhia needs to keep separately informed. Each case carries a set of actions. The team turns them into tasks and assigns each one to whoever owns it. HR complaints that are not whistleblowing route through the same system to the HR team.

"Now we have it all in one system. All the information, all the tasks, and we can have the reports in one place".

Removing the reason to hesitate

For Dhia, the measure is whether people at Savvy feelable to raise a concern at all.

"Having a third-party and independent solution will make people more comfortable raising their concerns," he says. The willingness to speak up was already there. Employees may have held back for fear of being identified or facing retaliation, and he expects SpeakUp to close that gap.

Beyond reporting itself, Dhia is also watching what agentic AI could do for early detection, once there is enough case data behind it.