REPSONSIBLE GAMING
their gambling from escalating. Three years down the line, the regulator said they had found serious shortcomings in the way operators complied with the duty of care obligations. Essentially, it was very uneven. Now, as of the first of October, the regulator was forced to introduce a new set of regulations for Responsible Gambling based on very low deposit limits. As we know, there will be plenty of players who are uprotected under such a scheme. So what at the start was an amazing framework has backfired. Now we have a set of regulations that seriously affects the profitability of the Dutch market. Not only does regulation have unintended consequences, it can be difficult to change. You have to do research, propose the regulations to the government which has their own political agenda and tackling gambling is not a big vote winner. So, you have to find a way to make the politicians happy and reassure them that they are not going to lose support. The industry also has to look at itself. Often, especially in competitive markets, operators won’t go to the regulator with a common proposal on how to improve the regulation itself. Their proposals are always driven by economic competition. that doesn’t help the regulator when they are trying to improve the regulations. That being said, now I have moved into the industry I can see there is real progress on improving Responsible Gambling and we have an exciting future too. Increasingly we can use AI to analyze player behavior and focus protection efforts only on the players who really needed it. AI has amazing potential to predict whether someone’s gambling can become problematic at a later stage. There are organizations, including Playtech, trying to promote this and it is gaining ground with regulators. Brazil’s new law requires licensees to analyze each player’s behavior and proactively engage with them and protect them. Several jurisdictions around the world are doing similar things, so it’s gradually shifting to using the power of AI to understand what’s going on and help you remain under control. We are just scratching the surface of the possible uses of AI. There’s reinforcement learning that can be used to better communicate with risky players. There are AI chat bots that can start personalized conversations with players iusing the behavioral insights offered by AI. And there’s sentiment analysis where AI can analyze conversations between players and agents and spot immediately in real time if there’s any risk element. So
there are some fascinating years ahead of us.
There’s one final area and that concerns information sharing. We do research, but we don’t share with each other, we don’t learn from each other. Importantly we don’t share our failures, we don’t tell others what doesn’t work, which is missing a great learning opportunity. Maybe there’s a role here for regulators to foster this kind of information sharing across your licensees. That could deliver a meaningful increase to the level of player protection.
The Responsible Gaming policy maker
Tracy Parker, vice president for policy standards and accreditation at the Responsible Gambling Council in Canada. She questions whether all attempts at RG have been supported by evidence. There has been a lot of criticism around regulation on advertising. In jurisdictions that have opened up to a great many operators, the volume of advertising has overwhelmed the population, and regulators have come under strong political and popular pressure to stem the volume of advertising. I’m actually in favor of regulations around marketing, but in a lot of cases we have political pressure combined with a lack of evidence. We all want regulation to be evidence based, but in
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IMGL MAGAZINE | DECEMBER 2024
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