The UK Gambling Commission (GC) recently announced significant achievements in the second phase of its financial risk assessment pilot project. The frictionless assessment system has successfully completed risk assessments for 97% of targeted customers, far exceeding the initial estimate of 80%.
Senior Policy Officer Helen Rhodes revealed that during the second phase of the pilot, three participating institutions conducted 1.7 million financial risk assessments on 860,000 player accounts, demonstrating the scalability of the system.
This innovative risk assessment mechanism aims to precisely identify potential financial distress in high-spending remote gambling customers. Unlike traditional affordability checks, its unique advantage is that it does not affect players' credit scores while providing operators with targeted risk warnings.
It is noteworthy that about 0.1% of customers who meet the risk assessment criteria (i.e., one in a thousand customers) are usually already marked by operators as a high-risk group, with a debt default rate significantly higher than the average for UK adults.
GC emphasized that this pilot not only verified the technical feasibility (with a success rate of 95% in the first phase increased to 97% in the second phase) but also deepened the research on cross-credit agency data integration and risk grading through ongoing assessments by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen).
In terms of regulatory actions, GC has recently successfully expelled several illegal football betting operators, including BCGame.uk.
Rhodes stated that the final phase of the pilot will focus on optimizing the risk grading algorithm to more precisely identify the severity of financial distress and develop corresponding customer support plans for operators. This breakthrough marks a significant advancement in the UK's responsible gambling regulation.
