UK LEGAL COMMENT
Decisions made on
financial risk checks and stake limits for online slots
Northridge Law’s Melanie Ellis examines the details of two key regulatory changes arising out of the Governments Gambling Act Review White Paper that have been published this month.
Financial risk checks Ahead of a Government debate on 26 February, on the topic of financial risk checks on online gamblers, the Gambling Commission’s Tim Miller provided an update on the progress of the regulator’s consultation exercise. Whilst a full response to the consultation will follow in March, Tim Miller’s blog post sets out key details about the approach the Commission will take in the new LCCP provisions. For “light touch checks”, which will be required at losses of £125 in a rolling 30-day period or £500 in a rolling 365-day period, the Commission has listened to feedback and these will now involve a review of publicly available information only. An assessment of whether the customer is subject to bankruptcy orders or has a history of unpaid debts will be required, but the operator will no longer need to consider data relating to the customer’s postcode. Crucially, the Commission’s proposal that operators should consider information relating to the customer’s job title has been dropped. There is currently no requirement that operators gather information about a customer’s job on registration, so these checks would have involved requesting personal details from customers, meaning they were not frictionless as intended by the Government. The updated proposal from the Commission means these checks can now take place in the background with affecting the customer experience. Of course, the operator may need to take action based on what
it discovers from carrying out a light touch check, and such action would affect the customer’s continued gambling. The Commission does not propose to specify what findings would trigger what action by the operator, but as a minimum an operator would be expected to place a financial limit on the losses that could be sustained by a customer with a recent bankruptcy. Operators will fear criticism from the regulator if they continue to take play from vulnerable customers, which does come with the possible unintended side effect of such customers being refused service altogether by regulated operators and turning to the black market for their gambling activities. To ease the introduction of these checks the Commission
intends that they will come into force at a higher threshold (which remains to be specified) for an initial period. This will mean a smaller number of customers will trigger the checks to start with, giving operators time to scale up their systems and processes. For the enhanced assessments, which will take place after
losses of £1,000 in a rolling 24-hour period (£500 for under 25-year-olds) or £2,000 in a rolling 90-day period (£1,000 for under 25s), the Commission proposes a pilot period of 4-6 months with a small number of operators who will share data with the regulator. The operators involved will not be expected to act on the data received during this pilot, rather they (and others) will be expected to continue using their current processes for affordability assessments and customer interactions.
30 MARCH 2024
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