Industry commentators have called for greater standardisation of gambling regulation across jurisdictions and queried whether a minimum standard could act as the basis for international regulation.
Speaking at the “Data Not Dogma: Appreciation of Evidence in Regulatory Development” panel at Monday’s World Regulatory Briefing on day one of ICE Vox, panellists argued that the time has come to agree on evidence-based principles to inform regulatory frameworks.
City University Associate Professor in law and Associate Dean Margaret Carren queried whether policy makers were at risk of “seriously overplaying” the cultural sensitivities and differences among countries when drawing up regulation.
Citing two pieces of research she conducted to identify markers of gambling-related harm across various European jurisdictions, she said, “It is almost impossible to actually make any meaningful comparisons between different jurisdictions as to the levels of gambling engagement, or problem gambling engagement. And perhaps surprisingly or perhaps not, it is interesting to know that there is a pan-European survey that deals with gambling-related questions, among other questions, for children, but no such thing is actually taking place for adults.”
She said the lack of evidence-based reasoning for divergent policies in different jurisdictions had led to her to question whether there really is such a varied sensitivity to gambling in different countries.
She asked, “Is this really so? Is there really such a difference between a person in Belgium and a person in France or a person in Germany that in one, the minimum exclusion period has to be six months and in another, it’s enough to have a minimum self-exclusion period of seven days, and in other countries, it’s 12 months.”
At the close of the session, she said she believed that it may be possible to establish some fundamental principles that would “benefit not only the industry, but also the players and the regulatory bodies themselves”.
Gamcare development director Mike Kenward revealed that the charity had had some conversations with standard-setting organisations around the world about a possible minimum standard for gambling.
“I would be really up for joining with other standard setters around the world to establish a kind of, I don’t like to use the word, lowest common denominator, but a kind of minimum standard that if you’re going to go into jurisdiction, this is the standard that you should be operating at. And we’ve had some early conversations about that with other entities around the world who offer standards”, he said.
Bettson Group head of data privacy and compliance governance Adriana Minovic said the industry was still in the early stages of using available data to craft regulation. She argued that while similarities exist across jurisdictions, the data need to be analysed in context and used accordingly.
nChain sales director Nick Hill agreed. “We’re looking at sort of like a standardisation across Europe with regards to KPIs to identify player behaviours or trigger markers of harm, but if you tried to get a player to fit into a particular KPI, that might not work because not one size fits all.
“But if you start to track player behaviour, and if the player behaviour changes, that’s when you can really start to proactively intervene. So say the player is visiting the site more frequently, depositing more heavily, or losing more heavily, that could trigger a marker of harm and that marker of harm is when the operator intervenes proactively with that player”.
As a proponent of blockchain technology for this purpose, Hill added, “Using technology, and blockchain technology specifically, as a utility application enables you then to place those interactions, that sequential event stream of the interaction between operator and player, on chain on the immutable ledger, that is timestamped for perpetuity.
“This then enables the operator to be more transparent to the regulator in that they can readily prove the interactions that occurred with that particular player or that group of players. It also protects the player in such a way, because we’re encouraging the operator to be more transparent and more open.”
He said regulators had been receptive to the use of blockchain technology for this purpose, although it is unclear whether that appetite would extend to launching a shared ledger that would enable full cross-jurisdictional comparisons.
