British Gambling Commission to start trial of single customer view
Gambling Commission CEO Andrew Rhodes said the trial will begin “in the coming months”.
UK.- The British Gambling Commission is to start a trial of a single customer view in just months. That’s according to Andrew Rhodes, the regulator’s CEO, who spoke at the International Association of Gaming Regulators (IAGR) conference yesterday (October 18).
A single customer view has been one constant that’s been promoted amid the planned overhaul of UK gambling legislation since Chris Philp was in charge of the legislative review. The move would make data about a player’s gaming available to all operators, making it easier for operators to spot unsafe spending even if it isn’t specifically on their own products.
Earlier this year, the Betting and Gaming Council (BGC) had said that it was reviewing options for such a development with the Gambling Commission and the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). The industry group had originally said it hoped to launch a trial in the last quarter of this year.
Now Rhodes said the Gambling Commission is still working with the ICO to develop the tool (the ICO had been providing input on the legality of the data sharing from a data protection standpoint). He said it was important to ensure customer activity was tracked correctly.
He said: “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 will allow operators to be alerted to customers who have been excluded by another operator due to concerns about their level of gambling, thus breaking this circuit.”
He added: “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. A single customer view could dramatically help reduce harm and that is why we will not accept progress at the pace of the slowest on this work either.”
Call for greater collaboration between regulators
Elsewhere in his speech, Rhodes repeated his call for more cross-border collaboration between gambling regulators in recognition of the fact that the gaming sector was becoming a “global tech industry”. He noted that much of the Gambling Commission’s observations extend beyond Britain and that M&A activity and emerging technologies like NFTs and cryptocurrency posed challenges for regulators everywhere.
He said: “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 poses for all of us.
“As I’ve already said, we all want the same outcomes for our jurisdictions – operators who are compliant with our regulations and rules. 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?”
Cost of living crisis
Rhodes also commented on the impact of the current cost of living crisis but noted that to date there was little evidence of an impact on gaming consumption.
He said: “No doubt there are similar stories to varying degrees in many of your jurisdictions, but increases in the cost of living appear to be leading to operators starting to make changes to their staffing and operations – even before we see much evidence of it affecting consumer gambling spend.”
He also criticised gaming operators that sponsor English football clubs but mainly operate in other markets, with only white-label licences in Britain.
“If I take the Premier League and Championship as examples, we see overseas operators with little presence in the UK market sponsoring teams due to the international television coverage. They have to be licenced in the UK, but sometimes we are not the target market,” Rhodes said.
