Industry experts have expressed their concerns regarding online slot stake limits set to be introduced in the UK later this year in a recent CasinoBeats Summit webinar.
An SBC webinar titled ‘What’s at stake? Adapting to lower statutory slot limits – A CasinoBeats Summit discussion’, discussed the UK government’s announcement last week that from September there will be a maximum stake limit of £2 for online slots for people under the age of 25, as well as a £5 limit for anyone aged 25 or over.
Kwiff CRO Ian Perrygrove, L&L Europe Ltd CEO Christopher Dalli and Kindred’s Head of Corporate Affairs – UK & Global Tom Banks took part in the webinar moderated by Sarah Ramanauskas, Co-Founder of the Game Safety Institute.
At the start of the conversation, each participant was asked by Ramanauskas if they thought the stake limits were good, bad or somewhere in between.
Dalli was against the stake limits, Perrygrove thinks it is “quite good to have the clarity” and that “a decision has finally been made so we can all work forward on a more level playing field”, while Banks was down the middle as “while it’s a good-intended policy” he feels there are some “missed opportunities in how it’s going to be delivered”.
Ramanauskas gave her own opinion on the online slot stake limits as well, stating that she was also down the middle as she doesn’t think it will “necessarily produce much, or in the way of, harm prevention”.
Perrygrove has backed the stake limits as the industry now has “a final position” to work towards with enough time to make the implementations and that the regulation is “super binary”, hopefully making them quite easy for the UK Gambling Commission to enforce.
Banks, while agreeing with Perrygrove’s points on clarity now being given to the UK slots industry, believes an opportunity has been missed to create better regulations, as a “tiered limit or dynamic limit” approach should have been considered, linking it with financial vulnerability and affordability measures.
“We’ve almost missed the opportunity to leverage the technology and the data we have available to us in an online context… we’ve missed the chance to do something a bit more bespoke and tailored for online,” Banks said.
“The government were clear publishing the consultation when it first launched, that they would be a bit more complicated in terms of policy and legislation and that they wanted to do something quickly. While I understand that rationale, just because it’s the quickest thing to do, doesn’t mean it’s the correct thing to do in the long term.”
Banks continued: “I can’t help but think there was somewhat of a missed chance to link these two policies up and have a proper, customer-focused approach to this where individual customers are treated in relation to their own risk and their own profile.”
Ramanauskas then asked Perrygrove about how these stake limits should be implemented in the wider gambling environment to make sure vulnerable customers are not harmed.
Perrygrove noted that data such as the length of gambling sessions may become a more prominent indicator for potential gambling harm as a result of the stake limits, as he noted players could make their deposits last for longer periods during their gambling sessions.
While agreeing with the rest of the panel that it’s not wrong to have stake limits as a gambling harm prevention measure, Dalli thinks reducing stake limits is not necessarily going to cause more responsible gambling as the freedom of choice for the customer is being limited.
Dalli noted: “If we view it as ‘Is it a suitable responsible gaming measure?’ then I would say no, and the reason why I would say that is that we have already been going so far, for many years, on the affordability front, even though it has never been made legislatively compulsory.
“Anyone who has been in the market long enough knows that you either fall in line with the affordability obligations or you are going to fall foul of the settlements and penalties, that’s the situation.
He continued: “I’m very much in the ‘no’ camp because although we have seen a strong emphasis on reducing gambling harm, on reducing losses to customers, we are now verging very strongly on the territory of removing the freedom of choice from the customer.
“We’ve already gone to the extent of determining how much the customer can lose, what is affordable for them, imposing mandatory limits, determining for them what’s good for them. Beyond that, all the other measures that are coming in, I do believe will ensure that these customers will be looking for a better experience elsewhere.”
Banks agreed that customers could end up finding somewhere else to play, but also pointed to the licenced sector in addressing the challenge of making sure that the customer experience is still high quality through innovative products and the customer journey.
He stated: “It’s very clear that there will be a loss to operators that don’t have to do these measures. It’s within the government’s own impact assessment that there will be a loss in revenue. As I said, that loss of revenue isn’t just because player X is deciding to not play, it’s because they’re playing somewhere else.”
Near the end of the discussion, Perrygrove expressed concern regarding UK regulatory changes as a whole, as he believes it could impact the possibility of competition coming from new entries to the UK market.
Perrygrove noted: “We are at the start of a tidal wave of regulatory changes, we’re going to drown in that soon, consultation after consultation. They hit us at the end of last year in a governmental shift with a regulator wanting to move forward and push things forward.
“We’re going to see significant changes in different areas this year at different stages. As has often been said, one thing in its isolation isn’t necessarily going to make significant changes, but the range of them that we’re going to see coming in is going to continue to change the benchmark of our industry.
“I don’t think it affects us, as a small cohort of operators here, because we’ve already been through that … this is just yet another example of stopping competition in our industry with new incoming entities.
“It’s a real barrier, as most pieces of regulation are, it’s a barrier of entry into our market, to become a new competitor and to disrupt the field is becoming much more difficult.”
To watch the full ‘What’s at stake? Adapting to lower statutory slot limits – A CasinoBeats Summit discussion‘ webinar, click here.
