This week is Safer Gambling Week in Europe. To commemorate the event, SBC Digital ran its Player Protection Day – a series of six sessions focused on the latest in player protection and responsible gaming.

Following the conference, Charlie Horner was joined on iGaming Daily by SBC’s Project Director, Martyn Elliott, and Steve Hoare, Editor of the Player Protection Hub, to recap the event.

In his role as the Editor of the Player Protection Hub, Steve moderated one of the panel sessions and he explained that a particular focus throughout the discussion was collaboration between operators.

He said: “We found out that it’s been happening for a while. Flutter’s [Director] of Safer Gambling, Luke Sugden, was very keen to talk about Gamprotect, which is the next level in self-exclusion and data sharing.

“There’s a core group of five or six operators who have been trialling this over the last couple of years whereby they will share information on players that have been excluded from their site with others.

“Luke described how the data protection teams from these select groups of operators are now best friends, which has to be a good thing. When lawyers and data protection people are best friends, then surely good things are going to happen.”

Steve added that the UK Gambling Commission would like Gamprotect to be extended to include sharing information on customers who have displayed markers of harm. However, he conceded, this could be difficult given there is no standardisation of what constitutes a marker of harm across the board.

On this, Martyn said: “One of the big multinational operators identified hundreds of potential markers of harm within their system. Then to run alongside their system, they brought in a third-party software as well, which uses some different markers of harm, and found a whole different group of people who might be at risk of a gambling problem.

“So the task of standardising markers of harm across every operator that will be relevant to every player and catch every player is unbelievably complex.”

In a separate session discussing safer play messaging, Martyn was “shocked” to learn children as young as seven are being exposed to gambling through games such as Roblox which feature roulette and bingo-style games. 

He said: “Every time we get a set of statistics about levels of gambling disorder or gambling addiction, there’s also a big section that says how many minors have been exposed to gambling harm. 

“For the general public, they assume that those figures mean that young people have been gambling with the gambling industry. The reality is, without the connivance of parents, it’s almost impossible for children to put a bet on any of those regulated operators.

“So that means something else is happening and it’s probably things like loot boxes in video games and so on. But young people are being exposed to gambling in a number of settings and we need to think carefully about education.”

Reflecting on this, Steve added that if you’re playing roulette online for fun “the direct line from that is playing roulette online for money”. 

He concluded: “This comes back to the collaboration topic. It’s about educating customers, educating the wider public and educating children and that needs everyone involved.”