{"id":32251,"date":"2022-08-01T09:40:49","date_gmt":"2022-08-01T12:40:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/?p=32251"},"modified":"2026-04-23T06:21:45","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T09:21:45","slug":"im-hoping-people-will-come-to-iagr-and-hear-difficult-questions-debated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/im-hoping-people-will-come-to-iagr-and-hear-difficult-questions-debated","title":{"rendered":"\u201cI\u2019m hoping people will come to IAGR and hear difficult questions debated\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>IAGR vice president&nbsp;Ben Haden tells Focus Gaming News what\u2019s in store for the IAGR Conference 2022, and why he hopes regulators will hear some difficult questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<p>Exclusive interview.- The<strong>&nbsp;IAGR Conference 2022<\/strong>&nbsp;is around the corner, bringing people back together face-to-face for four days of gambling regulatory talk and debate. IAGR vice president,&nbsp;<strong>Ben Haden<\/strong>, who is also director of research and statistics at the<strong>&nbsp;British Gambling Commission<\/strong>&nbsp;took time out to tell Focus Gaming News what\u2019s in store.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe title=\"&quot;I\u2019m hoping people will come to IAGR and hear difficult questions debated&quot;  - Ben Haden, VP at IAGR.\" width=\"625\" height=\"352\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ebhdTHHiYuY?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Haden put this year\u2019s programme together with the aim to provide \u201csomething for everyone\u201d. There will be a mix of subjects, including tech, safer gambling, data, policy, innovations and legal matters. And, of course, there will also be the second&nbsp;<strong>IAGR awards<\/strong>&nbsp;\u2013 an opportunity for regulators around the world to highlight their best practice and innovation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This year\u2019s event is being billing as a&nbsp;<strong>kickstart for collaboration<\/strong>, sparking innovation in regulatory practice.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019ve tried to build on our conversations from Boston last year,\u201d Haden says. \u201cAnd I think you can\u2019t ignore the fact that we\u2019ve been living through this pandemic that\u2019s been the greatest disruptive event for our generation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cDuring times of disruption, you often get the most innovation, so I\u2019m really looking forward to hearing from colleagues and from people outside the industry as well as those who are watching the industry to see what\u2019s been done. What\u2019s different? What\u2019s been working? What hasn\u2019t worked? What could we change? And that\u2019s really driven how I\u2019ve tried to put the programme together.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Difficult questions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>The main aim is to promote discussion&nbsp;\u2013 including difficult discussions about the challenges that regulators face today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI\u2019m hoping that people will come to IAGR and hear difficult questions debated,\u201d Haden says. \u201cFor example, the very first panel of the conference is really going to be a challenge to say whether regulators face mission impossible at the moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI think we really need to stretch the boundaries a little bit in terms of trying to understand how we can do our job as well as we can, so provocation and debate,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Haden sees plenty of room for alignment in regulations, noting that there are certain challenges all regulators face in terms of emerging tech, identifying harm and the best way of approaching the black market. Most of all he noted that regulators face the challenge of rapidly&nbsp;<strong>changing business models<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI think what most regulators are looking at now when they\u2019re looking two or three years hence is to try and understand how they can best respond to the changing business models of the operators they regulate, so, for example, now there is probably far more resource spent on content and data than there was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWhen you add that to&nbsp;<strong>adjacent sectors that have gambling-like aspects<\/strong>&nbsp;or products and you have certain operators that are becoming more global than perhaps they were, you\u2019ve got some really difficult things to try to unlock and put back together so that as a regulator you can be as much as you can be ahead of the curve.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Haden sees IAGR as well placed to engineer the collaborations that are needed to help address those challenges.&nbsp;And while young jurisdictions can learn from the vast experience of regulators who have years of gaming regulation under their belts, Haden says it works the other way around, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI think it\u2019s the different perspectives that other jurisdictions have that make it far more interesting and worthy for those conversations. It\u2019s only by listening to people who are doing things slightly differently that you can look at your own jurisdiction and ask, would that work here? Why do we do it that way?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI\u2019m as interested in what the new jurisdictions are doing as they come online and how they\u2019re approaching it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As director of research and statistics at the British Gambling Commission, Haden has a particular interest in data and is keen to highlight the work of IAGR\u2019s statistics working group. He says data can help see how regulation sits in the global context, and he wants to see more progress on exploring how to get datasets \u201cout there, shared and even preferably linked\u201d so people can start to mine them for the information they hold and start to regulate more effectively as a result.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Check out the\u00a0<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ebhdTHHiYuY\" target=\"_blank\">full interview with Ben Haden on the Focus Gaming News YouTube channel<\/a>. Don\u2019t forget to\u00a0subscribe!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>IAGR vice president&nbsp;Ben Haden tells Focus Gaming News what\u2019s in store for the IAGR Conference 2022, and why he hopes regulators will hear some difficult questions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":176,"featured_media":32252,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"is_press_release":false,"is_interview":false,"is_opinion":false,"focusai_summary":"The IAGR Conference 2022 aims to foster collaboration and innovation in gambling regulatory practice, addressing critical challenges such as emerging technologies, black markets, and evolving operator business models. Ben Haden, IAGR Vice President, emphasizes the need for difficult discussions and cross-jurisdictional learning to enable regulators to stay ahead of industry disruption and effectively manage sector-specific risks. The event will also highlight best practices and the importance of data in regulatory oversight.","focusai_entities":"IAGR, Ben Haden, British Gambling Commission, Focus Gaming News","focusai_location":"","focusai_target_profile":"ceo_executive (0.9), regulator (1.0), compliance_legal (0.9), operator_casino (0.85), affiliate_publisher (0.7), product_ux (0.7), tech_data (0.85), payments_fraud_aml (0.7), investor_analyst (0.85), supplier_vendor (0.8), journalist_researcher (0.9)","focusai_suggestions":[{"label":"Regulatory Alignment Strategy","query":"What specific cross-jurisdictional initiatives or governance frameworks are being considered by IAGR to achieve greater regulatory alignment on emerging technologies and black market challenges?"},{"label":"Operator Business Model Impact","query":"How are regulators planning to adapt their oversight and B2B\/B2C licensing frameworks to effectively address the increasing resource allocation by operators towards content and data, and their expanding global footprints?"}],"footnotes":""},"categories":[164],"tags":[24151],"class_list":["post-32251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews","tag-iagr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/176"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32251"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":777009777,"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32251\/revisions\/777009777"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}