Gambling Commission issues update on financial risk assessment pilot project

Imago

The UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) has provided an update on its pilot of financial risk assessments, which are designed to identify and support high-spending remote gamblers.

The regulator’s director of major policy projects, Helen Rhodes, is taking the lead on the initiative, which is taking place in three stages. 

The pilot commenced in September last year and will run until April 2025. Phase one is now complete, with the full findings and data to follow.

It has been stated that the pilot is not a ‘live test’ as such. Instead, the test will be measured against four set criteria aims:

1. Frictionless part one: What proportion of those high-spending customers checked could get a frictionless financial risk assessment if they were introduced?

2. Frictionless part two: How quickly could credit reference agencies return a financial risk assessment?

3. Data relevance and accuracy: Is using credit reference data meaningful for understanding an individual customer’s current or imminent overall financial risk and financial vulnerability?

4. Implementation issues: How could the data be presented to operators to help understand the level of financial risk or vulnerabilities associated with individual customers? How could operators build financial risk assessments into their overall customer interaction processes?

It is important to note that the proposed financial risk assessments are different from ‘affordability checks’ which is already a well-known concept, even if its impact is limited.

The risk assessments would have more of a bite, getting to the key information in a targeted but non-invasive way. Crucially, there would be no impact on a user’s credit score.

At this point, the commission are gathering information on how the risk assessments could be used to support vulnerable gamblers and if it is viable to introduce the measure right across the betting landscape in the United Kingdom. 

Phase one saw more than 530,000 assessments carried out across three credit reference agencies for around 300,000 betting accounts which met a relatively high spending threshold, from a historical annual period. 

Of the assessments, 95% were matched, 92% involving a full assessment and the other 3% as a ‘thin file’, with no adverse information returned. Overall, this means a relatively frictionless process for all of these cases.

The remaining 5% of the assessments could not be matched, due to difficulties in identifying the customer and data issues.

While the Government’s 2023 White Paper indicated that 80% of accounts passed for assessment would be matched and 20% would not, the update dresses that these preliminary findings are only for stage one of the pilot. 

Stage one could also be considered a pilot for the entire pilot, with the other criteria items coming together to form the bigger picture. 

As immitated by Helen Rhodes, there needs to be further examination of the data and how robust it is. 

She said: “The pilot exercise is proving to be worthwhile in testing how financial risk assessments might work in practice and explore practical implementation issues before final decisions are made.

“Taking a staged approach to the pilot means that issues identified in the first stage can be explored further, such as data consistency across credit reference agencies where appropriate and data accuracy from operators.

“A key part of our work will also be to further support operators to consider how financial risk assessments could be put together with other information about indicators of harm which the gambling businesses already have, to support customers in as frictionless a manner as possible,” added Rhodes.

To learn more, visit our responsible gambling page which also offers resources and advice on where to seek help if needed.