Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), including problem gambling prevention, is an initiative taken very seriously by the online gambling industry, especially within the UK. With so many rules and regulations moving and changing by the day, iGaming operators are faced with the challenge of compliance and keeping customers in check, not an easy feat for anyone in today’s environment.
In an effort to help iGaming companies remain compliant, conference organizers such as SBC and Clarion dedicate sessions and entire events to the subject of CSR and problem gambling, with several sessions dedicated to these topics at SBC’s Betting on Football conference next week.
To take things one step further for UK-facing operators, beBettor has emerged with a groundbreaking customer affordability solution in the form of a responsible gambling network. beBettor CEO Harry Cott caught my attention when he mentioned Mark Blandford’s involvement with his project and straight away I urged Cott to attend Betting on Football (he will be there!) and educate relevant parties on his work.
“Two main drivers give what we’re doing credence right now,” shared Cott.
“One is the increasing focus by the UK Gambling Commission on the topic of affordability. We were seeing many statements coming out last year that indicated the commission were beginning to look into this area,” he said.
“The other point to consider is that the average customer has four accounts now in the UK. You then get into the situation where if the individual operator tries to calculate a customer’s affordability themselves and they’re only potentially looking at 25% of the transactions, how do they be responsible and actively manage that customer,” Cott added.
beBettor provides a superior solution to individual operator checks and open banking, two concepts that are full of limitations and challenges. Cott went on to explain how beBettor actually provides this superior solution, a bespoke concept that no one else has ever offered before.
“What we do is we ask that operators who join our network send us their customers’ information, PII data as we call it, ‘personal identifiable information’ and we would request from the operator your name, your age, your gender, where you live,” explained Cott.
“We would take that personal information and we map that against public, government information to basically produce an estimate as to how much we believe you can afford to lose every single month and remain within your financial safety zone so you don’t experience financial harm,” he explained.
“And then what we do is we ask operators who join the network to send real time transactional data to us so the amount of money you’re depositing and withdrawing, the amount of bets that you’re placing, stake in return, basically all your betting activity,” he added.
“Remember the average customer has four accounts, so if we’re collecting information from all four of your accounts we can calculate a global profit and loss our side, on you as a customer and we can present that back to each connected operator as a percentage, daily, of that customer’s monthly net affordability,” he said.
“And the way we do that, we’ve thought through all of the ramifications of the data-sharing aspect of it and this is very new, radical thinking, but that way in which we do it, so far, operators have been very receptive,” Cott confirmed.
beBettor are currently trialing with multiple operators including B2B providers and are in talks with most of the “big 5” UK operators, with a 2019 vision of expanding their network as much as possible in order to provide the best customer affordability checks on the market.
“Our whole business is about growing this network and making sure that our spending levels are as accurate as possible. We’re giving affordability scores and checks away for free, so any operator that joins the network, we provide C-level dashboards for aggregate information on potential ‘at risk’ and problem gambling populations inside your user-base,” Cott confirmed.
“How we make money is should operators want to receive our affordability data every day in bulk, via a big data dump, essentially, we charge a nominal fee per processed customer every single month and the difference there from, say, a more traditional credit checking type solution is that instead of paying quite a high fixed cost for a one-off static check, you’re paying a fractional cost for an ongoing, daily update on the customer,” he said.
“So if you want to supercharge your whole business based on our affordability data, that’s where we transition from free to premium, so it’s a freemium business model,” Cott added.
