The UK Gambling Commission has finally decided that financial risk assessments will be introduced. These are brand new and will sit alongside the financial vulnerability checks that have been in place for a while now. These assessments will be performed using information from credit reference agencies for the very first time, which will apply in the vast majority of cases.
However, the Gambling Commission admits that credit reference data can’t always be relied upon, with open banking touted as one of the fallback options. It’s a smaller role than the headlines might suggest, and a more specific one, but it matters for a certain group of players. Here’s where it actually fits in.
What are the new assessments?
These new financial risk assessments are targeting what the Gambling Commission considers to be large net deposits (which is the total deposits minus total withdrawals) within a short timeframe.
During the first stage, a check would be needed when the following net deposits are exceeded at the largest operators only:
- Over 25: £5,000 across a 24-hour rolling period
- Under 25: £2,500 across a 24-hour rolling period
Further stages are planned after that, and the thresholds are expected to come down considerably by the time the system is fully implemented. The exact figures for those later stages still need confirming, though, so nothing beyond stage one should be treated as settled.
However, despite not being set in stone, the Gambling Commission estimates that fewer than 3% of player accounts will be affected once the scheme is fully operational. Put another way, fewer than 3 in every 100 are expected to need an assessment, meaning the vast majority can bet and play completely unaffected by these changes.
How these checks will be done
Even if a player does hit one of the thresholds, these new checks aren’t expected to cause much disruption.
Roughly 97% of assessments are predicted to happen behind the scenes, with a credit reference agency doing the work and reporting back to the operator with any indicators of financial trouble – all without affecting credit ratings. This means most players will not be asked to provide bank statements or other financial documents.
However, roughly one player in every thousand will cross a threshold but won’t have enough information on file for the credit reference agencies to complete a check. This can happen in rare cases, such as if a player has changed their name or moved address recently. It can also occur for people who have only recently arrived in the country and haven’t built up a British credit history yet. These players still need checking somehow, which means finding another way to do it.
Where open banking comes in
Open banking is one of the options put forward by the Gambling Commission to assess financial risk when credit reference data is unavailable.
For anyone unfamiliar with this, it’s a system that lets a user share specific information from their bank account with an approved third party, securely and with permission. It doesn’t hand over complete access to an account. The bank confirms only the particular details that have been requested, and only for as long as the user allows it. The whole thing runs on secure infrastructure, rather than being an informal arrangement between a company and a bank. It’s already included within plenty of services, including online gambling.
Many players already deposit money using open banking through facilitators such as Trustly, authorising the payment via their mobile banking app rather than setting up a manual transfer. It’s quicker and simpler, which is why experts at Trustlycasino.uk say online casinos with Trustly have become so widely used. That existing familiarity, they suggest, could mean less resistance to open banking being used for financial risk checks in future.
Players may be even less inclined to object to using it once they consider the alternative suggested by the Gambling Commission, which is the much-disliked document checks. Anyone who has been asked for a bank statement or a payslip by an operator will know how frustrating it can be to fish one out, dated within the last three months, showing a wide variety of details, and photographed from exactly the right angle.
Overall though, open banking’s role in the new assessment process is set to be minor. It also wouldn’t be forced on anyone, which means every player would have to explicitly approve the sharing of information before anything happened.
What happens next
For players, there’s nothing to do at this stage. The Gambling Commission has only just confirmed that these assessments are going ahead, and the practical work of getting them up and running hasn’t started yet. So no one needs to take any action off the back of this announcement.
Instead, implementation groups will be set up shortly to work through the practical details, which is where much of the fine print will be settled. A formal consultation response document is due to follow, and that’s expected to confirm when stage one actually begins.
Exactly how open banking will be used, and in precisely which circumstances, is one of the things still to be fully worked out. As with the thresholds and the timings, the detail could always shift as the process moves forward.
However, it now looks highly likely that open banking will only apply in a very small number of cases, with a player’s complete agreement, rather than being the main option for assessing players’ financial risk in the UK online gambling market.
David Prior
David Prior is the editor of Today News, responsible for the overall editorial strategy. He is an NCTJ-qualified journalist with over 20 years’ experience, and is also editor of the award-winning hyperlocal news title Altrincham Today. His LinkedIn profile is here.
