Drop the pilot

Happy ICE everybody!

Whilst our intrepid team walk the floor at Excel London, it is left to yours truly to look on from afar and pick over the bones of recent statements from various members of the UK Gambling Commission (and the accompanying sinking feeling that inevitably comes with them). 

Perhaps most significantly, UKGC executive director Tim Miller announced “we will be setting up a pilot phase to see how the technology works and how it impacts consumers”. Andrew Rhodes said something along the same lines the following day.

This is a confirmation of a direction that was sign-posted in the consultation documents: namely that the UKGC doesn’t merely see its role as specifying precisely what operators have to do in order to conduct affordability checks, they are also getting into the business of cobbling together the specific solution they want operators to use. Hence, the idea of a pilot phase and the promise of “something new” in the offing.

Is this going to work?

At ClearStake, we’ve heard rumours of what this ‘something new’ might be, and we’ve also heard rumours that it doesn’t work, so let’s walk through all this step by step.

• First, it seems inconceivable that Andrew Rhodes or any of the current UKGC management will stand over a system that doesn’t actually solve the problem. That means that this new system has to actually do the job. It has to get a decent read on a person’s disposable income (and where that income comes from)

• Second, there is no way of doing that job without sharing financial data. This isn’t a statement of opinion, it is a statement of fact. So whatever the new system is, it has to involve financial data in some form.

• Third, all the mood music heard to date suggests that this won’t actually be the case. I would love to be proved wrong, but it seems an attempt is being made to pull together various sources of data to provide some sort of financial approximation of a given individual, which in turn will be used to make affordability decisions (we will still have to do AML decisions the old-fashioned way, just to heighten the absurdity).