Repairing the sector’s reputation

We are all proud about our work and what we achieve at our workplace, right? We bring entertainment to our customers and an extra thrill to everyday life. We provide a stimulating workplace, contribute to society with taxes and in some cases make contributions to the third sector. We care about our customers and do our utmost to ensure they don’t end up with gambling problems. We are a great industry! Unfortunately, this is not how the gambling industry is perceived from the outside. In most (all?) countries, the gambling industry lies right at the bottom of every survey when it comes to reputation and trust. Despite a variety of measures taken by the gambling industry to improve in areas such as sustainability and corporate governance, the result is still the same year-after-year. But does it really matter that there is no trust in the gambling industry? My answer is yes, it’s crucial. There are many reasons, one of the most important being that we need to be able to attract talent to our businesses. Our employees are our most important asset and in order to be competitive in the future we need to be attractive as employers. During the last couple of years, we have seen values such as sustainability and creating value to society are getting more and more important. We are also becoming more aware of ‘greenwashing’ and true transparency is seen as key to gain real trust. We also see that the demands on sustainability reporting are increasing along with the demands for transparency throughout the business. The gambling industry is slowly following this trend. We and many other companies do sustainability reporting using information regarding not only responsible gaming but also other sustainability areas. We are improving, but is it good enough? Still, we are very hesitant to talk about our most closely guarded secret: our dependency on a few high-spending customers. Few other sectors have such concentrated earnings in a very small segment of their customer base. Naturally, when this vulnerability is revealed in the business model it is clear to all observers how problematic earnings are from those who lose most. This secret cannot be kept forever. Hasn’t the time come to be transparent about a fact that is very well known to everyone in the gambling industry but to a very few outside of the industry? When we published our annual report in the spring it was the third year that we openly showed our customer segments revealing how much revenue each customer segment accounts for. When it was published it caused quite a stir with both negative and positive comments. The most common feedback being “great that you are transparent with the numbers”, and “how can anyone afford to lose €30,000 in a year?” We are proud that at the same time as we revealed our customer segments, we also introduced our yearly loss limit of €30,000 a year (which has been lowered twice since and is currently €20,000). Our yearly loss limit, in combination with all the other responsible gaming measures we have undertaken, has lowered our dependency on high-intensity customers and resulted in a decrease in our red customer segment from €13m in revenue to almost zero during these past three years. Has this initiative been the solution to the trust issues the gambling industry faces and problem gambling? No, but it’s an honest attempt to be truly transparent and make a real change for the better. We believe that there is no other way to create long-term sustainable development for our industry. We are a great industry, we just need to show it. Daniela Johansson is chief responsibility officer and deputy CEO at Paf. Johansson, who has been working in the gaming industry since 2001 and was appointed deputy CEO of Paf in 2017, currently heads up the company’s responsibility and HR department.