On the latest episode of iGaming Daily, supported by Optimove, SBC’s Multimedia Editor, James Ross, was joined by SBC’s Content Director, Ted Menmuir, to delve deeper into the methods and objectives of the UK Gambling Commission’s (UKGC) affordability check pilot programme.

As scheduled, last Friday (August 30) the UKGC launched its pilot programme to test the viability of unintrusive checks on customer deposits. Initially, the checks will begin at a £500 net loss threshold which will rise to £150 net loss by February 2025.

Ted described the programme as “the most important mechanism of how the government and gambling commission want to rewire the UK gambling sector’s protections and engagements with customers”.

However, he cautioned that identifying high-risk customers is not an exact science, Therefore, the UKGC has been accused of “trying to fit customer care protocols into a big box called affordability”.

When setting out its aims for the pilot programme, the UKGC emphasised the focus is on developing a system that will successfully identify high-risk customers while keeping the betting experience frictionless for the majority of players.

The UKGC estimates that affordability checks will not impact 90% of bettors and only 2% will be required to go through one-to-one customer interventions before they sign up.

On the potential success of the scheme, Ted said: “If it does what it says on the tin and the checks are unintrusive at the levels the UKGC pledge then I think that they should be commended. You have to remember that the UK will be the first market to go through the process of adding a layer of affordability checks on customer protections.

“For me, what stands out is the objective or determination on affordability as a measure to identify high-risk customers. Again, I’ll revert to the fact that there’s no exact science for that. There are many variables as to why a customer is high risk and I think that just adding the affordability checks mark on that will not fulfil that.”

Another policy implemented to try to curb spending by high-risk players was the outright ban on the use of credit cards for gambling transactions.

The National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) was commissioned to undertake a full evaluation of the impact of the ban, which was implemented in April 2020, and the organisation found that it had no impact on high-risk gamblers.

“What the study determined was that high-risk gamblers did not change their behaviours,” explained Ted. “There wasn’t a layer of protection by the fact that they knew that they could no longer gamble with credit cards.

“What happened is that because these are risky customers, they still managed to gamble. They still found a means outside the system to borrow money outside of the financial systems and it was an uncontrollable element.”

Despite the lack of impact on high-risk gamblers, NatCen reported that the ban “changed the behaviours of medium to low-limit players in how they engaged in gambling” as the credit card ban added friction to the process of gambling with borrowed money.