The Cost of Non-Compliance in the Gambling Industry

In 2023, there were thousands of global regulatory updates in total. From monitoring many thousands of regulatory announcements and new rules and bills enacted across the globe in 2023, Vixio's team of analysts found 685 regulatory updates that were directly relevant to the gambling industry - and 131 of these regulatory updates were actionable. With all that noise, how can you be sure you won’t miss one?

The day-to-day life of a compliance professional consists of a seemingly endless list of jobs to be done; tracking regulatory changes and new incoming regulations, getting expert advice, translation, answering ad-hoc questions - the list goes on. It’s a lot for one team to contend with. In 2024, you can no longer rely on manual research to remain compliant, and even one missed update can have a detrimental effect on an organisation; hefty fines, reputational damage, legal action, or worst-case-scenario, licence revocation. 

It happened to one company just recently. 

What happened?

A gambling operator was fined €8.7m for responsible gambling failings relating to some of its highest spending customers.

Why?

According to the gambling authority, the company violated the duty of care requirement in gambling law for its jurisdiction because:

• It didn’t act quickly enough to protect customers who were gambling thousands every day
• It didn’t impose strong enough measures to prevent these customers from experiencing harm
• It didn’t follow up on signs of problem gambling with safer gambling interactions beyond simple “nudging” messages
• It didn’t follow up on whether the nudge messages were having an effect in reducing problematic gambling. 

Their customers therefore continued to gamble in large amounts, showing some signs of excessive gambling, like setting high deposit limits, making several deposits a day or playing several times a week. 

Where did they go wrong?

Not taking action early enough. The operator did eventually impose much harsher limits on these high spending players, but should have done so earlier, the regulator said. 

But it's not all about the money

As well as fines, companies must consider the value in maintaining clean compliance records, avoiding having to report on regulatory violations to regulators, eliminating the risk of negative publicity, and avoiding legal costs associated with resolving regulatory shortcomings.

The cost of compliance is high, but the cost of non-compliance is higher. 

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Learn more about how Vixio GamblingCompliance can cut down research time by up to 90%, for a fraction of this cost.

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