CAESARS EMEA
Operating responsibly
Casino International spoke with Caesars’ EMEA MD Mike Rothwell about the company’s commitment to responsible gaming, how they are going the extra mile for their customers – and how this makes perfect financial sense
Mike Rothwell O
perators want players to play, because that’s the core of the gaming business – but no operator wants players to end up with a problem. There are several organisations in the UK alone to support
problem gamblers, but the front line will always be the casino staff. So just what is Caesars doing to prepare its staff, and how can that impact the bottom line? Mike Rothwell, Managing Director of Caesars Entertainment EMEA, talked to Casino International about the company’s ethos.
Casino International: Caesars approach to
responsible gaming, what are you supporting and how has it developed? Mike Rothwell: The casino sector generally has done a pretty good job on leading on responsible gaming and social responsibility, so if you look at the Playing Safe initiative which sets out the principles casinos will follow in promoting responsible gaming, it’s built around caring for customers which is of course the right thing to do. But it’s also about building confidence for regulators, government, customers and various other stakeholders. How? It’s quite straightforward again – training,
research, education, Charge 21, self-exclusion, test purchasing; a key part of what came out of this was the SENSE program, which is Self-Enrolment National Self-Exclusion. Caesars was one of the key operators driving that, certainly with the strong support of the National Casino Forum and other casino operators. What SENSE does is, allows a customer that is having problems with their gambling to self-exclude and that can be from one property, or it can be nationally. That’s a big benefit because we have noticed in the past that problem gamblers do have certain behaviours that make them more susceptible to addiction, for example. If they have a bad example in one casino, they may just go to the
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one nextdoor which doesn’t help them, and it doesn’t help the casino sector. So SENSE was a big deal, launching in August 2015 on the back of the Playing Safe program which itself launched in 2013. Since its launch, if my numbers are correct, around 6300 people have joined the SENSE program and worked through it. It’s worth noting that in the context of casino
visitation in the UK that is an incredibly small number; it’s fair to say that because of the processes and procedures in casinos, the prevalence of problem gambling tends to be lower than other sectors, where there is less opportunity for intervention in a less supervised environment. Caesars has enrolled roughly 940 people into the SENSE program so we are quite proactive, with a slightly higher percentage than the average by number of casinos. It’s worked well for us. In the wider context of social responsibility, it goes without saying that you put the consumer at the heart of your decision-making; customers are key and without their confidence we do not have a business. From my perspective there are three ways of looking at social responsibility and they all align. I don’t know if all businesses think this way but I think they should. They are: employer perspective, regulator and government perspective, then finally the economic perspective. The employer perspective is important because we operate in a sector which does have the opportunity to create risk for customers; the pub sector is similar, in that if people consume too much of that product it can be bad for them. We want to run our business right and to be seen to be responsible about the way we do it, and then we can attract the best talent to work for us, and we can motivate them and get the best results. We can only do that if those people believe and understand that we apply ethical principles to the way we operate our business, with integrity. It’s very
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