In January of this year, the Mindway AI team put a panel of special guests together to discuss responsible gambling and what the experts are expecting in 2024. We’re now in Q3 of 2024, and we got curious to see if any of these predictions came true, including a rise in problem gambling and introducing new regulations. Read on to find out what we got right and wrong so far!
Stricter regulations
The general consensus from the entire panel was that 2024 will bring about stricter regulations around the globe. Specifically, we touched on the Netherlands, Germany, the UK and the US.
Mike De Graaff, Director & CCO of BetComply, gives perspective on the Netherlands, which is going through a unique round of regulation submissions, said:
“What we are seeing, especially in newly regulated markets like the Netherlands, is that based on public fallout or political development, you see very swift changes in regulation where the restrictions become more heavier. … The minister is proposing new restrictions that include, for example, interventions or actions based on indicators within one hour. So, players show a sign, you [the operator] have to action within an hour.”
As yet, there is a similar “real-time monitoring” policy enforced by the KSA in the Netherlands, but it has a time limit of one calendar month, not an hour. However, former KSA chair René Jansen told the Gaming in Holland conference in June that they have a policy of operators having to “intervene within one hour upon detecting suspicious or excessive gambling behaviours”, which is to go into force on October 1 2024.
Meanwhile, in the UK, the Gambling Act Review white paper was published in April 2023, poised to throw everything into chaos, and a year on it doesn’t seem to be making much of an impact.
Dan Spencer, Director of Safer Gambling at EPIC Global Solutions said: “So are we going to shake up the world of regulation this year in the UK? I don’t think so.”
“Prediction number one for me that should be on that chart is we will continue to see fines this year in UK-facing operators. And we got a bit of a spoiler of that yesterday as Gamesys received their £6 million fine. And I think what I take from that fine, and also the ones that we saw at the back end of last year, is that even though we have a stricter regulation, we have better capability to detect customers and risk in those customers.”
A Rise in Problem Gambling
One prediction discussed by the panel is the rise of problem gambling. The idea posits that the US market in particular is so new, having been opened by the Supreme Court in 2018, with millions of new players flocking to this new service that predictably a large cohort of them will fall into bad gambling habits.
But how should operators handle it?
Brianne Doura-Schawohl, founder and CEO of Doura-Schawohl Consulting suggested: “My best piece of advice for the industry at large is to not deny that harm does exist. There’s a lot of chatter right now about the illegal market versus the legal market. My fear is that as Congress and other policymakers really begin to question what problem gambling is, and how this nascent industry impacts prevalence rates, we’ve got one congressman who has come out and said let’s just ban advertising.
“I was just asked about it the other day by a mainstream publication. He compares it to tobacco. Here in the U. S., you cannot advertise about tobacco. And the real reason that tobacco isn’t advertising or allowed to advertise anymore is that they denied harm, right? They suppress this information. They denied it. And so, my best piece of advice for the industry is to not deny, to accept, to be proactive in addressing it, to be superseding regulations even when it makes you uncomfortable or fearful it could prevent play.”
As yet, there hasn’t been a ban on gambling advertising, and the upcoming US election is volatile to even consider if this Democrat, Paul Tonko, has a chance of implementing it in the future.
As for the rise in problem gambling, the National Council on Problem Gambling has reported a significant increase in calls to its helpline since the US market opened in 2018. In 2019, the hotline received 200,000 calls, then 270,000 in 2021. The data sure seems to point to a rise in problem gambling which should be addressed. This is further backed up by the recent report by the American Gaming Association (AGA) revealing that investments in responsible gambling from gaming companies have reached a remarkable $471.8M annually — a 72% increase from 2017.
The growth of AI
The discussion in the panel was bound to turn to AI, where it was posed that education is the real problem when it comes to AI in gambling. It was also suggested that AI could do a lot more, in automating identification and verification measures and sometime in the future maybe even be standard across the industry.
Mindway AI CEO Rasmus Kjaergaard, said: “We wanted to develop a system that would be explainable for everybody who uses it. And everybody who would be at C-Level or any other level be part of the decision to start deploying it. On the other hand, they also provide operators with more individualised detection on each and every player.”
The growth of AI, especially in iGaming, was inevitable. AI is only going to get better, and iGaming is prime for it, where applications within software can make drastic changes in an industry that famously embraces new technology.
2024 is not over yet however so what might happen in the remaining months can still change. We are keeping a close eye on these developments and more to see how it might impact the safer gambling landscape for 2025 and beyond. Watch this space.