It’s a date with destiny: Friday August 30. The day the UK Gambling Commission rolled out its affordability checks on punters for the first time.
This is the first phase of a pilot scheme that will run well into 2025, with any punters that set off certain triggers subject to a ‘light touch’ check on their financial status.
The regulator has suggested that affordability checks won’t be ‘formally’ rolled out until they are satisfied that these will be ‘frictionless’ for the majority of punters – hence why they’re only at the pilot stage right now.
But if the Gambling Commission is satisfied that the financial risk checks can be performed in the background with no knock-on effect to an individual’s credit score, there’s every chance they will be formally introduced into law next year.
All Change
As of August 2024, any punter whose net monthly deposit reaches £500 will be subject to an affordability check.
This will be carried out behind the scenes, with various credit reference agencies in the UK used to determine the individual’s financial status.
The information that betting sites will use in determining the so-called ‘affordability’ will already be in the public domain, including data on declared bankruptcies, unpaid debts and missed credit payments. It’s believed that other details, such as job title and postcode, will not be considered during this pilot scheme, nor will bookies have access to an individual’s bank account or payslips.
The range of measures available to a bookmaker when a customer triggers a check will range from encouraging them to voluntarily introduce a monthly deposit limit on their account, right through to forcibly limiting how much the individual is allowed to deposit and/or bet.
The change has come as a result of the former government’s White Paper into the UK gambling sector, which recommended the introduction of financial risk checks to bolster the measures that licensed bookmakers already had in place to track vulnerable customers.
As of February 2025, the threshold that will trigger a financial risk check will fall to just £150 in net monthly deposits.
Loss Checks
One layer of the pilot scheme relates to net monthly deposits, while another is designed to cut ‘flash losses’ – i.e. punters staking a considerable sum during a short period of time.
To try and tackle these issues, bookmakers will be tasked with instigating checks when a customers loses £1,000 or more during a 24-hour window, or where their loss reaches £2,000 over the course of a 90-day period. The thresholds are expected to be much lower for those aged 18-25.
These are the limits that will be introduced for the pilot scheme, however representatives from the Gambling Commission have confirmed that these thresholds could change if it’s decided that the policy will be rolled out permanently.
It’s worth remembering that this is only a pilot scheme for now, with no confirmation as to whether its measures will be implemented on a permanent basis once the trial comes to an end in 2025. However, it’s likely that both deposit and loss limits will be introduced given the nature of the White Paper and its recommendations.
According to Stuart Andrew, the former gambling minister who played a part in the dossier’s publication, only around 20% of punters would trigger the deposit or loss limit thresholds.
“We are clear that financial risk checks should not overregulate the gambling sector, should not unduly disrupt the millions of people who gamble without suffering harm, and should not cause unnecessary damage to the industry,” Andrew said back in February.
It’s also true that many bookmakers are already voluntarily communicating with customers who have been flagged up by their system as depositing or losing considerable sums – although the number of fines metered out by the Gambling Commission to firms failing in this regard is alarming.
There’s a wider concern that more punters will consider checks – no matter how ‘frictionless’ they may be – to be an infringement of their privacy, and will instead choose to use offshore and black market bookmakers instead.
That could put them at risk – non-UK licensed firms often don’t abide by the same code of practices as licensed operators – while also seeing money can could be pumped into the horse racing levy disappear overseas.
Senior figures in racing have already suggested that affordability checks could see as much as £250 million lost from the sport over the next five years, although there’s a feeling that on-course bookmakers could benefit from the measures introduced by online betting firms.