Tim Miller, the Executive Director of the UK Gambling Commission (UKGC), urged more operators to sign up to the industry’s proprietary safer gambling tool GamProtect.
The Director gave a speech during GamProtect’s launching event earlier this week, where he praised the collaborative efforts to bring the initiative to life since the idea was first put on the table back in 2020.
“It is now over four years since we all started talking about what we then referred to as a ‘Single Customer View’,” Miller reminded. “The Commission asked industry to collectively explore what was possible…that could protect consumers from harm whilst also protecting their data.”
The project has been commissioned by the UK Betting and Gaming Council (BGC), with external support from the UKGC, the Information Commissioners’ Office (ICO), and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).
Miller also gave credit to the firm legal foundation that GamProtect has received under the guise of the ICO, with the safety of consumer data being the prevalent talking point at every stage of the project’s launch.
“Ever since the idea of what would become GamProtect was first discussed, there have been plenty of questions asked about how secure people’s data would be.
“These concerns have been felt across the board as well, from operators to safer gambling campaigners and of course consumers concerned about their own privacy.”
In order to ensure that the data of vulnerable players is protected and not mishandled by third parties, GamProtect has set up a system in place that evenly spreads the data sharing responsibilities across three main shareholders.
The first in line is the so-called ‘closing operator’, which is any of the participating companies that closes down the player’s account.
Businesses that have enlisted in the GamProtect so far include Flutter, Entain, bet365, William Hill, Broadway Gaming, and Betway – with all of their subsidiary brands.
Next is GamProtect itself, which consolidates the secure data sharing between all operators. The solution receives customer data from participating operators on a regular basis.
Finally, the ‘receiving operators’ are the businesses last on the chain to receive the data shared by the ‘closing operators’ so that they can match it against their own customer database, closing down the account of a customer that comes up across both datasets.
“Where an operator has closed a customer’s account after identifying a customer that has self-declared a very serious marker of health related gambling harm, the system allows for that operator to share that decision by a flag through the system with other participating operators,” Miller clarified.
“Thousands of people have already seen interventions as a result of GamProtect, that would otherwise have been at risk of experiencing serious harm.
“And that is just during these early stages of development. And I am here to say that the progress made by BGC and the team at GamProtect now means we are in a position to encourage more operators to come forward and sign up to the scheme.”
More data presented by the UKGC Executive Director highlighted that 5527 consumers have already been identified by GamProtect, with 88% of them matched by at least one participating operator, and 66% by at least two.
Miller continued by comparing the joint safer gambling initiative as an “appealing carrot” that should push other operators to join GamProtect as well.
However, with every appealing carrot also comes a stick, Miller pointed out, which in this case is the Gambling Review White Paper.
The text, first published in April 2023 after a prolonged delay, leaves the door open for a mandatory participation in a relevant scheme that addresses the challenges GamProtect is already looking to meet.
“GamProtect is your opportunity to be ahead of the curve and shape something that could, in the future, become a requirement,” the UKGC Executive Director concluded.