Q&A: Sky Betting & Gaming on whether the UK is becoming overregulated

In a climate of increasing UK regulation, operators are required to fulfil more and more stringent guidelines to stay compliant and licensed. But how fine is the line between regulation and over-regulation? Can the industry and its regulators find a happy medium to allow both to prosper?

As one of the UK’s biggest sports betting operators, Sky Betting & Gaming (SBG) occupies a privileged position in the UK market. SBG’s head of safer gambling, Ben Wright, chats to EGR Intel about the gathering storm of regulation hitting UK operators and how the industry and regulators might navigate through it.

EGR Intel: Is gambling over-regulated in the UK?

Ben Wright (BW): For us, we don’t think it’s become too strict, as you can see the direction of travel in terms of where regulation is going. The key is having open collaboration between operator and regulator to help shape the argument for regulation and the environment which comes from this. We want to be a fair and open business, we are a significant generator of revenue for the UK treasury and part of this responsibility is to minimise harm and the cost to society which may be incurred due to gambling.

I think we must be careful to not apply heavy-handed regulation that maybe works for an offline world, where it’s more anonymous, to an online world where we know our customers and we have an incredible amount of data about them. We need to be looking to be not overly onerous with our regulation but driving forward with developments to keep people safe at the same time.

Proposals like Tom Watson’s are on the right lines, but as operators we need to discuss how to take these proposals forward between us. We have that incredible view of customers, I think perhaps we need to work more across operators to understand the customers overall position across the industry. Doing that across multiple operators is something we’ve never looked at, so perhaps we need to take this forward. But from our perspective we’re keen to evolve the way we do things now without a need for introducing more onerous legislation.

EGR Intel: Your former CEO Richard Flint once called on the industry to learn the lessons of SBG’s failure to deal with self-exclusion and its resultant fine. Given the issues with GAMSTOP, do you believe the industry still has a lot of work to do?

BW: The short answer is yes, there’s been a lot of developments that have really changed the game in the last year or so. GAMSTOP is a great development, it may only be soft-launched now, but it is helping people. It does have shortcomings, but we think it’s a positive step in the right direction. From my limited experience of problem gambling and my interactions with present and reformed problem gamblers, if you can effectively combine GAMSTOP with a product like Gamban, which we have a trial with now, coupled with bank transaction blocking from so-called challenger banks like Monzo or Starling, that’s a really effective base to start getting control of players’ problem gambling issues.

GAMSTOP faced its early challenges, but there’s a lot of time and effort being spent in improving that and making it the best solution that it could possibly be. Having said that, we know the numbers that are going through GamStop and there is a silent majority of people that are already getting a lot of value out of the service already.

EGR Intel: What role did SBG have in the development of Sky’s one gambling ad per commercial break limit? Do you think this limitation will have the desired effect in reducing problem gambling and the normalisation of gambling in the UK?

BW: We think it will make a bit of a difference in public perception but we also believe it is important that gambling companies can advertise, because we have been devoting a lot of our advertising to the safer gambling tools that we offer. The investment in these ads generated a huge uplift in usage of all our tools, particularly the newly built Profit and Loss product which shows the powerful effect ads can have when used for non-commercial reasons.

As a member of the wider industry, we followed Sky’s announcement regarding commercial breaks and played a part when the industry took the pragmatic step of following suit. It will be interesting to see if public perception does change next season because those two things are going to dramatically reduce the volume of ads in this perceived “bombardment” of gambling advertising when people are watching sporting events.