Financial institutions in the UK may be lending more than £174m [$219m] a month to people who are using a risky proportion of their income on gambling, an analysis of the spending patterns of loan customers suggests.
The credit technology firm Abound looked at the open banking data of people who applied for its loans and used artificial intelligence to assess all their financial transactions over a six-month period.
The leading debt charity StepChange said the results suggested lenders could be unwittingly fuelling gambling problems by extending credit to people who deposited much of their money in betting accounts or used it to wager in high street bookmakers.
