Will consumers really share bank details in order to bet?

What better way to ring in the year than by reading this excellent summary by Scott Longley for iGB, of where we are at present in the interminable affordability debate.

A number of nails are hit firmly on the head, not least of which is the current (slightly wilful) failure of the industry to understand the direction in which the wind is blowing, and take proactive steps to control and manage the process on that basis. 

As we’ve said before, putting our collective fingers in our collective ears and hoping the whole thing goes away really doesn’t feel like a strategy, certainly not at this late stage. Having said that, I do feel the industry itself is ahead of the BGC (which it could be argued is just doing its job). Most operators we speak to are aware that change is both inevitable and something they need to plan for, starting yesterday.

But here I want to talk about something slightly different, which is the oft-quoted conclusion that consumers will not share financial information in order to be able to gamble, or as the article puts it (summarising this report sponsored by the BGC) “nearly 70 per cent of people who place a bet said they would be unwilling to allow regulated firms to carry out compulsory affordability checks to prove they can afford to wager”.

This is a claim that crops up repeatedly in one way shape or form. But how true is it, really?

There’s a couple of things worth saying about the 70% figure from the EY/BGC report before we go any further:

• Firstly, consumers are notoriously unreliable when it comes to any question about what they will or won’t do in the future, or indeed what they do or do not want. In general, data based on survey responses to ‘what would you do if?’ type questions is something close to worthless when it comes to really predicting the future.
• Secondly, there remains a huge amount of confusion amongst consumers about what affordability checks really mean, why they exist, and what their relationship with other checks (KYC, source of funds, etc) really is. You only have to spend a few minutes on social media to realise this is the case. Many punters appear to confuse affordability checks with staking restrictions applied by operators, for example. Again, I have a hard time really trusting data li