You spoke of a ‘silver bullet’ during your ICE Barcelona panel in the Sustainable Gambling Zone, could you explain this phrase in greater detail?

The question was really ‘what one thing could you do to stop the development of the illegal offshore gambling market?’ And I have a very simple view on this. There is no single solution, but there is one thing that is necessary, which is to stop treating it as a problem for the gambling industry and start treating it as an area of financial crime.

Essentially, the infrastructure, legal framework and enforcement which are already there to stop money laundering could be applied to this form of financial crime. Which it is, because it’s taking money off people for an activity that you shouldn’t be offering them. And that would help because it enables the banks, payment systems and even crypto networks and legitimate brokers to actually get involved and say ‘no, we’re not going to handle that business.’ 

Why isn’t offshore gambling being treated similarly to a financial crime, and what’s the difference in the way regulators approach the issue? 

Oh, I think actually it’s just because it happened so quickly. It’s reached a scale now that a few years ago you’d have never thought would be possible. And I think once the perception catches up to reality, then governments around the world and financial regulators will start to get involved. It’s only going to take a couple of cases involving organised crime and laundering funds through offshore gambling sites, which is almost certainly going on, until these other authorities take notice.

Absolutely, innovation stems from criminals, the black market and authorities have to move with that. Where does the Department of Trust come into play for those matters?

We’re really focused on using bank data for a bunch of applications in the gambling sector, but they’re all essentially around integrity and responsibility. The reason we’re really interested in bank data and information is because it’s the gold standard. It’s extremely difficult to manufacture bank data. If you want to go and register a bank account, and I’m talking about the UK market here, it’s a very tightly regulated process. It’s very thorough. 

The banks have significant resources invested in making sure that the only person who has access to a bank account is the legitimate owner, and they know who they are and where they live. It just occurred to me that if you could use that information to support some of the integrity challenges that the gambling industry is facing, we could make a significant dent in a lot of these problems, particularly safer gambling and responsible play. Also, smoothing out the path of registration, removing the frauds, identity theft, all the ways people try to use gambling sites in the wrong way. 

Will you be launching any new products and, if so, could you provide more insight as to what it will offer?

Funnily enough, we’ve actually just launched a product called Register with My Bank, which is extremely creative but super simple. Any operator that’s using this as an option for their customers, instead of saying fill out a form and then we’re going to check your data, they can say click this button, you go to your online or mobile banking, log in and press a button to confirm you’re happy to share your account information with us.

We then capture that information from the bank, which we can then verify through other sources and we give the operator not just the person’s name, address and date of birth, but the verification and risk analysis all at the same time. 

So the player wins because there’s almost no friction and no worry about having to fill out a form correctly. As long as your bank account is up to date, which it is in most cases, then we’re going to verify you because your bank has verified you. The thing I hate most is those systems where you’re forced to take out your driver’s licence and you’re trying to get it into the camera, but it doesn’t quite focus and then they say, ‘oh, can you take a selfie?’ I mean, oh my God, it’s just painful, really painful. And this solves that problem, it’s fabulous. 

During your panel, you talked about the industry having an image problem, as well as how companies marketing themselves more as entertainment companies rather than betting could be the fix. Is that realistic?

Well, I hope it is. If you look around ICE Barcelona, we talk about playing games, but I find it slightly jarring when people put up slides about losses. You make a loss in a financial investment, but that’s not a game. You don’t talk about losing money at Pac-Man. It’s a really interesting cultural thing, and what’s happened since the evolution of online gambling as a mass market is that the gambling industry has moved closer and closer towards the mainstream of entertainment.

It’s not completely there yet, and for good reason, because it does come with some downsides and externalities. You see these companies, and we talked about Entain for example, doesn’t even have the word gambling in the title. Playtech. You have to actually explain to somebody that it’s a gambling business, but I don’t think that it’s done to try to hide what they do. 

I think what they’re actually trying to do is position themselves and make a statement that we are part of the leisure and entertainment sector. You may not approve of it, but that doesn’t mean millions of people don’t enjoy doing it. We can’t brush under the carpet the fact that there are problems, but we can deal with those. That’s what’s so interesting about it. But frankly, to answer your question, if the industry doesn’t achieve that then it’s going to have a very difficult future. 

How important is it to have people such as yourself, who have operational and industry experience, involved with innovating the next generation of gaming?

Innovation really should be everybody’s business and in everybody’s interest. There’s a funny thing about the gambling industry when we talk about being innovative. Having tried several times to introduce new things into the sector, it’s actually incredibly hard to do. That’s not just because of regulation or the market structure or anything like that, it’s just because people are somehow naturally resistant to radically new ideas. 

Nobody wants to be the first to try something, but nobody wants to be the last. So how do you do that? The more people talk about our innovation absorption problem, the better we will be. And it’s old farts like me who have the experience and can say, ‘well, actually, this is the way it is. Let’s fix it.’

And how do you plan to overcome that natural resistance through Register with My Bank?

Well, you have to sell the benefits and be patient. You have to try it, and I guess you have to be humble, because at the end of the day it doesn’t matter what I think and it doesn’t even matter what the operator thinks. What matters is what the customer thinks. If you put it in front of people and they go, ‘well, I’m not doing that,’ then it’s a terrible product. 

When the open banking thing started, we were walking into a situation where operators were asking for consumers to send bank statements by email. Nine out of 10 would say no and they said no very strongly. Then, we introduced open banking and we thought we were doing well when we were getting 30% (response rates). 

Now, with some operators that are using our platform, if they’re really good at the communications, the signposting and their openness with the customer, they’re getting 90–95%. And they’re not getting it next week, they’re getting it right now because the player wants to play. It’s amazing what you can do once you explain it to people, they learn to trust it, try it and find that it’s not the end of the world. It’s actually quite easy and then you’re good to go. That, to me, is how these things get adopted, and it’ll happen with Register with My Bank. It’s going to be transformational.