As the CasinoBeats Summit is fast approaching, we’ve been looking at the different aspects to responsible gambling ahead of our Safer Gambling Forum.
Speaking at last month’s Amsterdam held iGB Live, Wes Himes, interim CEO of the Remote Gambling Association, he believes that the industry is ‘on the same page’ when it comes to implementing safer gambling measures, but that further industry collaboration is needed.
When asked about what more the industry can do to ensure that safer gambling initiatives are implemented, Himes explained: “The best thing that we can do is take action. Our work programme covers a whole gambit of areas from responsible gambling to advertising, and through all of that we’re trying to pull together a work programme that shows that we as an industry are taking forward initiatives to make it a safe and entertaining environment for our customers.
“And as long as we are able to do that and prove that we are doing that, then I think we’ll go a long way towards avoiding regulation that might have unintended consequences.”
He continued: “If you look at our industry, we created GamStop three years ago which is a self-exclusion scheme in the UK for all online licensees. So it’s not as though we haven’t had a successful collaboration, but I think that we also realise that we are generating lots of data and we’re understanding our customers more and more – and the next leap is to understand them across operators.
“And when we do that, we’re going to have a much bigger confidence level of knowing that customer, and that’s going to help us in terms of early intervention if they happen to show any particular signs of problem gambling.”
The conference takes place at Olympia London on September 17-20, alongside Betting on Sports – learn more and buy tickets for the CasinoBeats Summit here.
