Kansspelautoriteit (KSA), the Netherlands’ Gambling Authority, has published results from its updated approach towards mapping problem gambling indicators.
The regulator revealed the impact of its innovative approach using pseudonymised player data, which removes personal identifiers in favour of identifiers with placeholder values to protect customer privacy and increase data security.
Due to Dutch regulations, licence holders are required to store pseudonymised player and transaction data in mandatory data vaults. The KSA has analysed this data to exercise supervision in a variety of areas.
Several indicators of problem gambling have been assessed by the KSA, including the loss of large amounts of money, session duration, what part of the day gamblers are active, the number of deposits made in a day, the type of gambling vertical performed and interventions by gambling providers.
The KSA stated: “The goal of the project was to develop a method to monitor operators in terms of risky behaviour among their players. As a result of this project we are now able to compare operators on the basis of a wide range of indicators, identify extremes among operators, flag sudden changes and generally explore the impact of interventions.”
Linking different indicators together has unveiled new sources of information according to the regulator, such as the fact that playing at night is a general indicator of problematic gambling behaviour.
Another insight is that playing casino games at night happens more often than sports betting – which could mean that the games carry more risk than betting if we’re drawing from the previous statement about night time activity.
The KSA concluded: “Our approach which entailed working at the level of operators is relevant for supervision because it helps us prioritise the operators we should focus on in our in-depth investigations. Rather than flagging individual players as being at risk, we developed a set of indicators to assess the extent of risky play among all (non-incidental) players associated with one particular operator.
“We are currently exploring how we can best use this tool in practice and new insights from this process will be used to refine our methods. We are also expanding our focus to the level of individual players in order to identify players who are at risk. This will allow us to evaluate whether operators effectively use responsible gambling tools when at risk.”
The KSA is now exploring ways in which to implement the findings so that it can expand its capabilities when it comes to problem gambling prevention and treatment.
