The UAE’s General Commercial Gaming Regulatory Authority (GCGRA) sprung a surprise in early June when it announced Ciarán Carruthers – a man with no direct experience as a regulator – as its new Chief Executive Officer.
Carruthers, who caught most off guard with this latest move, has spent his entire career as an operator – much of it in Macau via stints with Galaxy Entertainment Group, Sands China and Wynn Macau Ltd.
Most recently he served as CEO of Australia’s Crown Resorts, successfully fulfilling his mandate to remediate the company – both operationally and reputationally – and win back its gaming licenses.
It’s not the typical journey into the regulatory sphere, and yet for an emerging jurisdiction with lofty ambition it could well prove to be a masterstroke.
It was Carruthers’ predecessor at the GCGRA, Kevin Mullally, who outlined the UAE’s approach to gaming regulation – revealing at an industry gathering last September that the agency would actively encourage industry operators and suppliers to push the boundaries when developing products for the greenfield UAE market.
“Our message to the industry and the technology providers is: don’t design your game around the regulations,” Mullally said. “Technology should lead, not the regulations, so if you can design a game that uses new concepts, uses reflexive math, combines elements of skill with elements of chance, integrates social media and figures out how to entertain your customers – the operators’ customers – in the best way you can, we will figure out a way to regulate it.
“Whatever you bring us, we will design a way, we will make sure it’s safe, we will make sure that we have data to ensure that the customer experience is protected. We want the technology providers to focus on entertainment, not look at the regulations and say, ‘I have to design my games within this box.’ We want innovation to lead and regulation to adapt, not the other way around.”
Such an approach should be music to Carruthers’ ears given that technological innovation was at the heart of his mission at Crown. Among its accomplishments in enhancing its AML and responsible gaming, Crown developed from scratch a whole new platform that brings together regulatory requirements around mandatory carded play, alongside time and loss limits and the linking of all play to the group’s Crown PlaySafe program.
Carruthers’ role at Crown was also unique in that it comprised an unusually significant government relations element. A necessarily large portion of the CEO’s time was spent not on property operations but working directly with Crown’s regulators in Victoria, New South Wales and Perth on the many compliance issues that saw the company lose its licenses in the first place.
Best of all, Carruthers brings a fresh regulatory perspective to the UAE. Unlike regulators who have never worked on the operator side, he understands precisely how operators think, what drives their decisions and the realities they face.
At the very least, this should foster a strong relationship between the UAE and its licensees. At best, it could give the country a distinct advantage in its bid to become the gaming industry’s new gold standard.
