Gambling Commission: Financial risk assessment pilot programme “proving to be worthwhile”

The Gambling Commission (GC) has shared a progress update on its pilot programme to introduce financial risk assessments for customers.  

Financial risk assessments are the regulator’s way of “identifying high-spending remote gambling customers who may be in financial difficulties, in order to help support them”.  

The GC was also keen to draw a distinction between financial risk assessments and the more controversial affordability checks, which it says it has no intention of proposing.  

The pilot trial involves a group of the UK’s largest remote operators and began in September 2024, with three stages scheduled to be completed by April 2025. 

Thus far in the pilot scheme, the GC has conducted over 530,000 assessments spread across three different credit reference agencies. 

These assessments accounted for approximately 300,000 accounts from a historical annual period. 

The GC stressed that the figures aren’t representative of how many accounts might be checked in a year should financial risk assessments be introduced, they are just the number of assessments that were undertaken to meet the test criteria for this stage of the pilot. 

Out of the 530,000 assessments carried out, 95% met the first success criteria of a “frictionless” assessment. 

This meant that the data shared by the participating operators was successfully matched by the chosen credit reference agencies, allowing for a financial risk assessment to be returned to the operator “in a frictionless manner”. 

From that 95%, 92% related to accounts where a full assessment was available while the remaining 3% were “thin files” where no adverse information was returned. 

Of the assessments carried out, 5% were not matched, meaning a frictionless assessment did not take place.  

Of this figure, 4% were due to the customer being unable to be identified by the credit reference agency and 1% because of data issues such as duplications or invalid fields provided by the gambling operators. 

The regulator also noted that the stage one findings should not yet be compared to the figures touted in the 2023’s white paper into the Gambling Act review, which estimated 80% of accounts referred for an assessment would be matched, and 20% would not. 

Helen Rhodes, GC director of major policy projects, said: “The pilot exercise is proving to be worthwhile in testing how financial risk assessments might work in practice and explore practical implementation issues before final decisions are made.

“Taking a staged approach to the pilot means that issues identified in the first stage can be explored further, such as data consistency across credit reference agencies where appropriate and data accuracy from operators. 

“A key part of our work will also be to further support operators to consider how financial risk assessments could be put together with other information about indicators of harm which the gambling businesses already have, to support customers in as frictionless a manner as possible.” 

The GC’s latest market insight data released earlier this month showed the number of online bets placed reached a record high of 25.9 billion between October and December 2024.