Changing the mindset: a how to guide

Spend 5 minutes in the company of a ClearStake employee and chances are you’ll hear the phrase ‘change the mindset’, specifically around the approach in most gambling operators to financial risk checks.

We use it a lot, and we are not ashamed.

But whilst changing the mindset sounds great, how does an organisation actually go about doing it? That is more complicated, and the subject of this blog. We won’t pretend that changing the mindset of an organisation is easy (and indeed, it probably shouldn’t be). But what follows are three core ways in which you can make it happen.

Before getting into that, however, let’s very briefly remind ourselves why we might want to do this in the first place.

Why the existing mindset needs to change

What follows isn’t true of every gambling business. But it is true of an awful, awful lot of them. 

When it comes to the matter of financial risk checks, by which we’re talking about affordability and AML checks that require looking at financial documents, the following attitudes are not uncommon:

• There’s not much we can do about the number of people who refuse to engage with financial checks
• Customers just won’t do them. Haven’t you read the Racing Post?
• Our compliance team are doing everything they can in difficult circumstances
• We’re waiting for the outcome of the recent Consultations

And so on. These are all, at heart, attitudes of defeat. A sort of fatalistic acceptance of something that we all wish wasn’t true, but unfortunately is.

These attitudes are also largely the reason why these same gambling operators are seeing 80% or even 90% of their best customers leaving as soon as they hit the thresholds for these checks. Which in turn, is why these attitudes, and this culture, needs to change.

Let’s find out how. 

Three steps to changing your mindset

One thing is certainly true: you don’t change a mindset simply by telling people to think differently. You need to DO things that then inevitably impact the way people think about their world, and the way an organisation operates: it’s culture, if you like.

‘Culture’ is hard to define. It tends to emerge organically. So it can be difficult to track how it changes, or separate out the different elements and influences upon it. Indeed the three steps below are all related. Even so, we believe they will make a difference.

1. Change the conversation from cost to retention

Compliance teams tend to understand that player checks are a necessary job they need to get done, and view success as doing that job well whilst expending as few resources as possible. That might be something