Time to make a good first impression

With the new Minister for Sport, Nigel Huddleston, faced with the task of drafting a new UK Gambling Act, now would be a good time to ensure the industry makes a good first impression. This applies not only to operators, but perhaps even more so to the highly visible affiliate sector, which will often be a customer’s first encounter with online gambling.

High profile failures of compliance, often involving affiliates, are widely reported, and rarely in a way that reflects the repeated challenges the sector faces in keeping up with the technical demands of compliant operations.

With a new act now being contemplated, the industry as a whole has a shared interest in avoiding bad PR which will shape the policy environment in which the new law is drafted.

So feedback from members of the Age Verification Provider Association should alarm compliance officers and boards of igaming businesses. Their experience is that, when given advice about the new UK Gambling Commission rules on age verification, up to four-fifths of the affiliates take no action to update their websites.

A small minority of affiliates warned of the new requirements have gone on to actually implement effective age checks, available from any of the many alternative vendors now available to provide independent, cost-effective but sufficiently robust, standards-based age checks.

Licence-holding operators are held responsible by the Commission for the actions of their affiliates. But because the affiliate market is an unregulated sector, they are not used to having to comply with complex rules.

Their focus is generating as many leads as possible, and they are understandably concerned that age checks could put off customers. In reality, conversion rates have been reported to improve dramatically, when the checks used are straightforward, because having already undergone an age check, the customer is more committed to the site, and to pursuing its offers.

Indeed, one leading affiliate serving the UK market has reported a 40% increase in conversions among clients after their ages had been checked, far outweighing what they described as a ‘marginal’ reduction in overall traffic passing the initial age check.

Some licence-holders no longer use affiliates at all or have restricted themselves to a small number of partners which they supervise closely. The imbalance in the risk level faced by an affiliate versus the risk of the operator losing their licence is almost too great to tolerate. Innovations such as the new trade association for affiliates, RAIG, present an opportunity to redress this balance.

Affiliates can protect their market by vigorously and rapidly implementing the new requirements for age checks which apply to both free-to-play games and real money gaming offers. Also, once an age check has been passed, then the site is free to use all the imagery from the games it is promoting, without being concerned about whether it may fall foul of Advertising Standards Authority rules against the use of images which may be attractive to children.

So, while affiliates are not regulated themselves, it is now very clear that they need to think and act as if they are, to give operators the confidence to trust them with their own compliance record.

If so many sites continue to bury their heads in the sand on these new rules, even when their obligations are carefully explained, then the affiliate sector will inevitably face an uphill battle in selling their services to operators, and potentially a licensing regime of their own.

Iain Corby is the executive director of The Age Verification Providers Association, a not-for-profit trade body representing organisations which provide age verification services – AgeChecked, GB Group, Pay360, VeriMe, W2 and Yoti . He previously held the position of deputy chief executive at GambleAware