The Finnish Ministry of Interior (MoI) has proposed reforms to the country’s Lotteries Act to Parliament in a bid to ‘reduce gambling-related harm’.
The Lotteries Act spans the entire gaming industry in Finland rather than solely the National Lottery.
The proposals to amend the Act include mandatory identification for all Veikkaus Oy gambling following on from its introduction to the state-owned operator’s slot games earlier this year.
Mandatory identification is intended to launch for all games in 2023, though scratch card games will be unaffected until 2024.
Marketing regulations will also be amended under the proposals and the MoI seeks to vastly reduce the amount of advertising across the industry.
It states that holistically, marketing should be ‘moderate’, however, for particularly harmful games such as slots, marketing will be ‘prohibited’.
All marketing would be forced to disclose information pertaining to age limits, as well as offering self-banning and exclusion schemes to protect players from gambling harms.
The Lotteries Act reforms seek to introduce payment blocking to any non-Veikkaus operators which operate outside of the state-owned monopoly. Additionally, the National Police Board would maintain a blocking list of gambling companies whose payment transactions should be blocked by banks and other payment service providers.
An MoI statement on the reforms read: “The basic premise of the reform is that Finland’s gambling system in the future will be based on the state monopoly. The proposal builds on the Programme of Prime Minister Sanna Marin’s Government, which states that the Government will implement the second phase of the reform of the Lotteries Act.
“The key objective is to reduce gambling-related harm. In accordance with this objective, the identification of players will be extended to cover all gambling, intervention by the National Police Board in unlawful marketing will be strengthened, and the prevention of harm must be taken into account in the placement of slot machines in the future.”