As part of a far-reaching sustainability drive in the United Kingdom, renowned gambling operator Entain has recently doubled down on its efforts to promote responsible gambling across all of its brands. Customer protection has been a widely-discussed issue in several markets across the globe and the United Kingdom happens to be one of the areas where it has taken a center-stage especially considering how vast the country’s gambling industry is.
New Affordability Checks
Perhaps the biggest highlight of Entain’s announcement was its “pioneering” affordability checking model for its United Kingdom-based customers. This is part of the company’s new Advanced Responsibility and Care (ARC) which Entain hopes to fully implement sometime in the summer of 2021.
According to the company, this will involve the utilization of personalized stake limits and credit checks using publicly available data for customers. The key focus will be on the data that represents signs of high-risk behavior. That is far as it goes for now – requesting financial data such as payslips and bank statements has some pretty serious privacy implications.
Already, Entain has rolled the new feature across 14 of its brands in the region which is a pretty serious undertaking. The company claims to be the first major operator in Britain to launch a technology-led customer protection solution such as the one it launched.
“We have been working on player affordability concepts for the past 18 months as part of our ARC affordability programme. This aims to identify relevant limits at the right time to protect customers whom our technology has identified as being vulnerable, or particularly at risk.”
~ Entain group’s operations director Peter Marcus.
Besides the new affordability checks, the company is also working on integrating more models based on behavioral indicators. Hopefully, this will work as expected in assisting Entain to protect its customers.
Action or Reaction?
While it is certainly a good cause, Entain’s rather rushed decision to improve its customer protection measure might be motivated by some external factors. It is quite easy to see that this comes just at the time when the British government is mulling over tighter gambling restrictions and preparing to overhaul some gambling laws that have remained outdated despite the rapid growth of the online gambling industry over the past several years.
Regardless of whether Entain is doing this out of goodwill or is simply trying to fend off tighter regulation, it is about time that customer protection is taken more seriously in the United Kingdom.
