Gambling suppliers are developing technology that may bring the elusive regulatory ambition of achieving a ‘single-customer view’ to fruition.
GeoComply CEO Anna Sainsbury, nChain sales director Nick Hill, and Playtech Managed Services CEO Elena Rousseva all contributed to a panel discussion this morning on how embracing emerging technologies is bringing the industry closer to realising the ambition of a single-customer view for the purposes of safer gambling.
Speaking during the ICE Vox “Shared Experience: How Suppliers Play A Role In Enabling Safer Gambling” session, Hill said: “Because of the nature of blockchain and what we can do with it, we can anonymize the personal data, but your player history, your player health, or your gambling ID can travel with you. But not your personal data. No single operator is going to share their player data, because obviously that contravenes GDPR”.
By the British Gambling Commission’s definition, a single-customer view would enable a holistic view of a customer’s online gambling behaviour and help reduce gambling harms. The idea is that the customer’s data would be transferable from one operator to another, offering protection for vulnerable players across the entirety of the industry.
The difficulty is that sharing such data might not be compatible with various data-protection laws, such as the one referenced by Hill, the UK’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Using the blockchain anonymizes the data, while making it permanently available, which in turn can then be accessed by the player, operators, and regulators.
Commenting on the response of regulators to the use of blockchain for this purpose, Hill said, “Once they understand that there is a utility application to blockchain, they are very receptive, because they can see that we’re using a progressive technology to protect and enhance the player’s experience. So, the regulators I’ve spoken to thus far are very, very positive.”
The goal of making this holistic approach to player protection a reality is shared by Sainsbury, who described a GeoComply initiative that is looking at ways of achieving the same thing in the U.S.
“A year and a half ago, we set up a non-profit called Conscious Gaming and it’s focused on bringing the industry together as a thought leader in what we can do about responsible gaming and how we can all get on the same page. And we had, you know, a lot of the same kinds of conversations that Nick was talking about on how we can anonymize these users, so that we can share self-exclusion information across state lines”, she said.
Meanwhile, Rousseva shared how Playtech’s player protection AI, BetBuddy, is helping the business to analyse player behaviour and intervene accordingly.
She said progressive technologies are helping Playtech to contact the player at the right time, using a method they are receptive to, to make an intervention effective, when market data shows that in general, at least 50% of customers will be unreachable.
“The need to have dedicated platform technology that does this job isn’t absolutely critical, but I must admit that it’s equally true that we constantly work on it, constantly improve it. In the last few months, we have realized that a lot of feedback comes from those effective interactions. I’m stressing the word ‘effective.’ We can feed back into the AI database to make sure that it’s an even a smarter tool that takes into account the insights that we’ve gotten from these effective interactions. So it’s an evolving tool, but it’s something that we simply can’t imagine doing our job without”, she explained.
