Responsibility for detecting and addressing gambling problems is not distributed appropriately among major stakeholders. In most jurisdictions, each individual operator is tasked with assessing a player’s risk. The problem is that they must do this without having a complete picture of players’ activity across other operators. Operators use different AML/KYC, payments and player-management systems, as well as risk-detection algorithms. Whether internally developed or purchased from a vendor, all the data is siloed.

As a result, a player deemed high risk by one operator can easily be seen as low risk by another. No operator has the complete view that would truly determine risk. There is, at minimum, a perceived conflict of interest for gambling companies in balancing the imperative to maximize revenue and minimize harm. Many players and the general public are losing trust in the industry.

Regulators have traditionally faced daunting challenges – in staffing, budgets and technical knowledge – in tracking the massive volume of transactions and customers flowing through gambling companies. There has been a clear shift in regulators’ attitudes toward doing more to protect the public, with the proliferation of AI, push notifications and increased activity among younger gamblers. Today, regulators are increasingly concerned with using data to better protect the public.

The good news is that it’s not just marketing and betting technology that has reached a new level; regulatory technology has begun evolving alongside it to equip regulators with automated (no extra staff needed) tools to monitor activity in near real time, identify emerging risks and better understand trends within their own jurisdictions. In other words, the tools now exist for regulators to move from reactive oversight to proactive protection without expanding resources. 

The future: Regulator-led safer gambling

To address these issues, we suggest shifting some responsible gambling (RG) responsibilities from operators to regulators. Regulators are capable of doing what individual operators cannot: seeing all the data. Data is everything in the modern gambling industry – and it is especially critical in RG.

What if transactional data could flow from operators to regulators daily and a risk report appeared in the regulator’s inbox each morning? This is no longer hypothetical. Existing technology in the hands of regulators could import the data and run an RG screen on a customer’s total gambling activity across all operators, identifying players who currently fall through the cracks of single-operator detection.

Today’s technology empowers regulators to do more with less: automated regulator alerts and interventions when thresholds are met, enhanced reporting and research capabilities to inform future policy, universal deposit limits and investigations reduced from months to hours. It’s a major unlock for regulator efficiency and safer gambling.

The empowerment of regulators with technology lifts the entire industry, enabling regulators to protect players more effectively. Operators also benefit, as the burden is removed from deciding whether a high-volume player should be sent to the VIP or RG team; instead, an objective, cross-operator assessment can support safer gambling.

The future of safer gambling better balances the burden of risk and responsibility among stakeholders. It is imperative that regulators move from passive to active approaches to increase public trust. With this approach, the additional burden for regulators is low, but the impact on consumer protection is immense.