The importance of safer gambling within the Rank Interactive ecosystem

At Rank Interactive, our approach to safer gambling lies in continual improvement. One of Rank Group’s five strategic pillars is to “build sustainable relations with our customers by providing them with safe environments in which to play”.

The sustainability of those relations and interactions underpins our wider approach to customer service, and we put safer gambling at the heart of every interaction that we have with our customers.

Over the past four years, our approach has evolved significantly. No longer do we rely on fairly simplistic triggers, based purely on financial thresholds, to reactively engage with our customers. Through the launch and development of our proprietary Hawkeye platform, we monitor our player base 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Hawkeye extends far beyond simple financial thresholds and looks in more depth and with greater insight into how we might need to support a customer.

Hawkeye’s technology allows us to dynamically score customers based on key demographic, transactional and behavioural data in real time. If a customer’s score exceeds the pre-determined threshold, this is a trigger for action – for instance, a safer gambling interaction. 

Our ‘Hawkeye pilots’ sit within the player protection team, monitoring the system and identifying when any customer exceeds the score threshold, while the system also automatically creates a case file in the customer management system. This helps to make sure all customers exhibiting markers of potential harm are swiftly identified and flagged for appropriate contact. 

The ‘markers of harm’ score considers a range of behavioural factors, including, but not limited to, session time (the total time a customer has ‘spun’ on a game, rather than simply time logged in); payment methods used; and failed deposits, which can indicate when a customer has insufficient funds to make a deposit.

By tracking these behaviours, we not only identify when a customer’s play at a particular point in time is concerning, but we are also able to build a picture of that customer’s behaviour over time and identify trends in their play. Therefore, if a customer were to repeatedly exceed the markers of harm risk trigger score, the nature of our response would change.

The earlier we can do this in a customer journey that may be showing signs of deviating from safer gambling, the better our chances of finding appropriate support for each customer. What that support looks like varies by customer according to what Hawkeye identifies. We’re continually refining the model, based on what we’ve learned, with the express ambition being to build sustainable relations with our customers.

And there’s more to come. We are currently developing our Hawkeye platform into ‘Hawkeye 3D’. This will build on our monitoring of behavioural markers of harm, extending its monitoring into two further dimensions of risk and play: money laundering and positive play. 

‘Hawkeye money laundering’ will monitor more than 15 markers of potential money laundering traits and give a weighted risk score that will allow our team to identify and investigate potential money laundering in real time.

The ‘Hawkeye positive play’ dimension will use a variation of the Canadian-developed Positive Play Scale (PPS) which examines player behaviour around four key components: honesty and control, pre-commitment, personal responsibility and gambling literacy. This will allow us to assign a dynamic positive play score based on a player’s use of safer gambling tools or limits, their style of play and the interactions we have with them.

We will also be able to make more balanced judgements around players and all their dimensions of play, looking at both the risk factors and the positive behaviours, such as the use of safer gambling tools and showing control/awareness over their gambling. 

Ultimately, we’re developing the cutting-edge proprietary technology of Hawkeye to support our skilled colleagues who are committed to giving our customers the best and safest experience with us at Rank Interactive.

Liam Smith is director of customer operations at Rank Group. Over four decades, he has held several senior strategic roles in operational leadership, mainly in the energy sector, before moving into gaming with Rank Group in 2016.

Since then, he has overseen the creation of Rank’s new customer operations hub and focused on its real-time 24/7 player protection framework, combining safer gambling, enhanced due diligence, AML, and fraud and payments.

The framework allows digital customers to play safely, maintain compliance for the business and balances commercial business growth for sustainability.