The U.K.’s Gambling Commission is going to begin trials soon for monitoring the gaming activities of single customers in the months to come, Andrew Rhodes, the chief executive officer of the commission said at a speech on October 18. He was speaking to the International Association of Gaming Regulators (IAGR).
The single-customer view, if it ends up being deployed, would provide data on individual players across all betting operators, while also, Rhodes claimed, protecting their data. That way operators would be able to be proactive even if a player was spreading his or her betting around multiple platforms.
Earlier this year the Betting and Gaming Council (BGC) announced it was collaborating with the commission to offer options for the single-customer view. In 2020, the BGC announced it would launch a trial of such a system by the end of this year.
Rhodes said, “We continue to work with industry and the Information Commissioner’s Office to develop a single customer view,” adding, “A problem we will all face is that a very responsible operator may exclude someone from gambling, or force a pause in their gambling as they are showing signs of harm. However, this may simply result in a person who may be in distress simply moving to another operator, and then another, and another.”
The single-customer view would close that loophole. Operators will be alerted about customers who have been excluded from other properties and operators. Rhodes concluded, “A trial is due to begin in the coming months and we look forward to the results, but this has the potential to be a significant step change in improving the safety of gambling.”
During his speech, Rhodes called for more cooperation of this sort across international borders.
He noted that the effects of the Covid pandemic continue to affect land-based casinos. But the sector is slowly recovering, while online gaming enjoyed a surge of growth during and following the pandemic’s worst effects.
He said, “Clearly online gambling grew rapidly during the pandemic when the land-based sector could not operate, or was heavily restricted,” adding, “Some tend to point to this as a sign that gambling participation has exploded – it has not.”
Players in the U.K. are driven by cost-of-living increases and new safer gaming measures. This is causing some gaming companies to reconsider staffing and operations without waiting to see evidence that their operations will be adversely affected.
However, Rhodes’s message was one of international cooperation. “We see greater collaboration amongst all of us, gambling regulators across the world, as the essential next step in tackling the challenges that the morphing of the gambling market into a global tech industry pose for all of us.” He concluded, “In a world where many of us have the same companies, operating at the same scale, offering the same products, why can’t we share notes on how they are performing?”
