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CORRECTION: Another story was mistakenly posted under this headline.
The head of the UK Gambling Commission has called on the world’s gambling regulators to intensify cooperation to the point of “taking action” on compliance enforcement and intelligence gathering.
Gambling Commission chief executive Andrew Rhodes told the International Association of Gaming Regulators (IAGR) annual conference in Melbourne on Tuesday (October 18) that growing difficulties facing regulators can be offset by more elaborate forms of cooperation.
Rhodes said the commission wants to know “how we [can] combine our thinking, our ideas, our intelligence and what we’re seeing in the industry, [to] find something that we can work together on to improve our outcomes".
“I want to find opportunities for us to cooperate together. I don’t just mean sharing what we do; I mean taking action. And I mean that really, really seriously.”
Consistent with its aggressively collaborative message, and akin to scenes at corporate expos such as G2E, Rhodes and his colleagues reserved a room near the conference hall at the Novotel for scheduled one-on-one meetings with other regulators.
He did not elaborate on new types of action that partner regulators might accomplish, but hinted that outcomes could include tougher scrutiny of operators in shared markets.
Rhodes raised the example of an operator who was “subject to action” in Norway, and whose disciplinary record and “fit and proper” status Rhodes then raised with the operator.
“So I’m very interested in how we join up on that, because our industry is 800 times the size of us in terms of money. But what if we all worked together?
“That’s fundamentally different, because you’ll all be facing the same operators largely that we are. If they’re in our jurisdiction, they’re probably in yours, or want to be.
"And if we’ve gained compliance from them and you haven’t, that tells you something about culture. If you’ve gained compliance and we haven’t, that tells us something about culture.
“I want to share best practice and learn from each other. We’ve all got war stories, we’ve all got things that didn’t go well, things that we didn’t get right, that others can learn from, but things that did work as well.
“Whenever we can, why don’t we coordinate action?”
Rhodes said overlap of regulatory interests in driving compliance, addressing anti-money laundering, safe gambling and other matters are more unifying than any differences between legislation.
“There is nothing that should be stopping us combining as a group of regulators to sensibly approach that, and that is my plea to you.
“I want to have a meaningful conversation with anybody who is interested in that cooperation,” he said.
Rhodes also warned of expanding punitive measures for the British market if the volume and seriousness of breaches of the law and exploitation of gamblers, including "recidivist" operators, persist.
“We keep finding things that we shouldn’t find” when examining the top 250 gambling accounts from the last six months, he said.
Meanwhile, a long-promised trial of the “single customer view” mechanism that tracks individual problem gamblers across operator accounts is set for January, he said.
