Sightline Payments recently released data to the University of Nevada Las Vegas International Gaming Institute (UNLV IGI) that identifies various clusters of payments behavior. The data will help understand how payments behavior can support responsible gambling efforts.
“As digital payments have helped fuel the immense growth of online sports betting and online casino, understanding how digital transaction data can identify potentially harmful behaviors is critical for helping people wager responsibly,” said UNLV IGI Senior Research Fellow Dr. Kasra Ghaharian in a statement. “I want to thank Sightline for the opportunity to work on such an important project. These findings will be critical for building interventions for people who have or might develop a problem.”
Sightline contributed data from nearly 100 million transactions, including online casino, mobile sports betting, pari-mutuel, lottery, and cashless gaming at casinos. From the data, IGI researchers found that more than 88 percent of customers exhibited patterns of behavior not suggestive of unsustainable or harmful behavior. Of the remaining 12 percent, researchers found three clusters of behavior that may represent customers potentially at risk of experiencing harm.
Researchers described customer payment behavior according to the frequency, amount, intensity, and variability of their deposits and withdrawals, as well as the time of day they made deposits and how often deposits were declined. A machine-learning algorithm was used to cluster similar customers based on these payment behaviors.
“Sightline’s collaboration with IGI and Dr. Ghaharian on this study is critical to understanding the role that payments play in identifying problem gambling markers of harm,” said Sightline Co-CEO and Co-Founder Omer Sattar. “This research will serve as a foundation to build next-generation solutions that help identify customers who might have issues with their gambling behavior.”
