5 Leaders – 1 Question: Europe’s unified safer gambling standard and the challenge of compliance
Five key igaming figures share their views on Europe’s unified safer gambling standard and the main compliance challenges operators are likely to face.
Special report.- Focus Gaming News presents “5 Leaders – 1 Question”, a special series featuring five leading voices from the industry sharing their views on a question tied to a current topic in the sector.
In this first edition, the question is: With Europe’s unified safer gambling standard being introduced this year, what will be the biggest challenge for operators in terms of compliance?
The participants are Björn Fuchs, deputy CEO at Janshen-Hahnraths Group B.V.; Andreas Ditsche, CEO of igaming.com; Dr. Joerg Hofmann, senior partner at Melchers Law Firm; Christian Piska, professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Vienna; and Sarah Gardner, deputy chief executive at the UK Gambling Commission (UKGC).
How the idea of a European standard came about
In 2022, the European Gaming and Betting Association (EGBA) asked the Committee for Standardisation (CEN) to create a standardised list of markers of gambling harm. The body said that a European standard would improve the early identification of possible risky or problem gambling behaviour among online players.
The project was accepted and, from 2023 onwards, with the participation of gambling authorities, operators, health experts, academics and consumer organisations through the national delegations within CEN, the draft of the first European standard on markers of harm began to take shape. Then, last September, a strong majority of national standardisation bodies voted in favour of the standard, in what was seen as a milestone for player protection in Europe.
CEN is expected to publish the final standard this year. From there, its application will be gradual and voluntary, depending on how each national regulator decides to integrate it into its licensing and supervisory framework.
Fragmentation, national law and implementation risk
For Björn Fuchs, deputy CEO at Janshen‑Hahnraths Group B.V, the first and most immediate challenge is structural: a cross‑border standard that sits on top of highly divergent national regimes. He notes that a “European cross‑border standard doesn’t necessarily align with national legislation and enforcement”, which means that interpretation and implementation can vary significantly from one jurisdiction to another. In his view, operators can only navigate this landscape if national rules remain “stable, coherent and [with] clear definitions”; constant shifts in policy rules and rapid‑fire legislative changes “will ultimately destroy a market”.
Fuchs also highlights a second fault line where the new standard will be stress‑tested: the intersection between harm detection and data protection. Effective safer‑gambling controls depend on “complex, high-quality player data from all available systems”, yet any attempt to collect and unify this data operates under the constraints of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and national privacy laws. That tension, he suggests, makes it difficult to build systems that are both robust enough to spot risk early and fully compliant with privacy expectations. At the same time, he argues that operators will have to move from “reactive compliance to a proactive responsibility” embedded in their core business strategy. “There is more focus on preventing harm, instead of acting upon it when it occurs. Indicators have to be weighed carefully, in order to prevent unnecessarily harassing or limiting players,” he says.
Dr. Joerg Hofmann, senior partner at Melchers Law Firm, broadly welcomes the new standard as an “important and long‑overdue step in the right direction”, particularly because gambling has remained outside the harmonised areas of EU law and cooperation has historically been fragmented. He credits the EGBA for championing a voluntary framework that encourages Member States to establish more uniform approaches to identifying gambling‑related harm, even in the absence of formal EU competence over gambling regulation. However, he warns that the central challenge for operators will lie in practical implementation.
Hofmann points out that Markers of Harm have become “an increasingly popular tool” for detecting problematic behaviour, “and rightly so”, yet their effectiveness depends entirely on how they are configured and combined in practice. “If too few markers, commonly exhibited by the broader player population, are sufficient in a limited combination to trigger intervention — such as deposit limits, cooling-off periods, or outright bans — the result will be a significant number of unjustified restrictions. This, in turn, generates player frustration and risks pushing users away from licensed, regulated environments and towards unregulated alternatives: precisely the outcome that safer gambling frameworks are designed to prevent,” he says.
Drawing on Germany’s experience with rigid limit‑monitoring systems, which he presents as a cautionary example, Hofmann warns that “overly rigid threshold systems have already produced unintended consequences there, and European regulators would do well to take note.”
In his view, the ultimate value of the European standard will depend not only on which harm markers are adopted, but on how they are calibrated. “Regulators and operators alike must ensure that implementation is evidence-based, proportionate, and regularly reviewed,” he concludes.
Compliance vs effectiveness and the illegal market risk
For Andreas Ditsche, CEO of igaming.com, the core difficulty lies in the gap between being compliant and actually protecting players. In his view, “The biggest challenge is that compliance and effectiveness are not the same thing. Europe risks creating a system where operators are fully compliant – while players increasingly move to the black market. If safer gambling standards ignore actual player behaviour, they may unintentionally weaken player protection instead of strengthening it.”
Soft law, legitimacy and “competence creep”
Christian Piska, professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Vienna, takes a much more sceptical view of the new standard, questioning its democratic legitimacy and its implications for regulatory sovereignty. In his assessment, “these European standards are a hoax”: they create very real regulatory pressure “without going through a democratically legitimised lawmaking process”, and they drive convergence in an area where there is no clear EU mandate for a unified online gambling regime. What is presented as voluntary coordination, he argues, is in reality “a centralising benchmark introduced outside formal legislation.”
Piska stresses that online gambling markets across Europe are far from homogeneous: ” they differ in products, player behaviour, legal traditions, enforcement cultures and regulatory structures.” According to him, national states should therefore “remain free to maintain systems that reflect their own social concerns and the specific risks of different forms of igaming.” A single European standard risks weakening functioning national approaches, “even though no convincing case has been made that those systems have failed or that a real cross‑border regulatory gap requires this kind of standardisation”. Formally, he notes, the standards are described as voluntary; in practice, that label is “misleading”.
His concern is that, over time, conflicting national standards might be withdrawn and the new benchmark used by courts, regulators and market actors as “quasi-authoritative benchmarks.” What is presented as coordination, therefore, looks like “competence creep: a soft-law path to centralisation without a clear legislative mandate and without a proven need. For operators, this does not simplify the market. It creates another compliance layer on top of divergent national systems, different authorities and inconsistent implementation,” he says.
A regulator’s perspective on collaboration and control
Sarah Gardner, deputy chief executive at the UKGC, views the emerging European standard through the lens of regulatory cooperation rather than legal integration. She notes that the Commission “recognises that we regulate a globalised market, and that improving consumer protections internationally depends on effective collaboration between regulators and stakeholders”. In practice, this means active engagement with partners across Europe, as well as through organisations such as the International Association of Gaming Regulators (IAGR) and the Gambling Regulators European Forum (GREF), to support the development of shared approaches that advance the UKGC’s strategic objectives.
Gardner “welcomes efforts from EGBA to strengthen regulatory collaboration and to improve how operators identify and respond to potential markers of gambling‑related harm”, but is equally clear about the legal status of the new framework. For Great Britain, the standard is voluntary and “not a requirement of holding a GB licence”; licensees are already required under the existing Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice to have effective controls in place to identify and act on risks. The challenge for operators, she implies, will be “to ensure they remain effective and compliant with the Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice applicable to their licences.”
