Safer Gambling Week 22: Using Technology to Detect and Deter Gambling Harm

Contribution piece by Dr. Edmond Mitchell, Head of Data at Future Anthem: As Safer Gambling Week gets underway, AI and data science powerhouse Future Anthem has released a white paper advising operators on how to respond to the UK Gambling Commission’s regulatory changes. Dr. Edmond Mitchell, Head of Data at Future Anthem tells Gambling News about these changes, and how businesses can utilise state-of-the-art technology to protect players.

Future Anthem’s new white paper, entitled Real-time is now, opens with a quote from Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are aChangin’” a phrase I firmly believe is entirely appropriate for the current landscape across the wider gambling industry.

To give this quote context, last month the UK Gambling Commission implemented new remote Customer Interaction requirements, focused on ensuring that operators do more to identify customers at risk of harm.

Not only were operators told they should be doing more, but they were also been informed they should be implementing automated processes that recognise strong indicators of problem gambling

The reality is that players can gamble whenever and wherever they want thanks to the advent of new technology, putting the power of choice at their fingertips. Of course, this is music to the ears of operators and suppliers that have developed a leading range of games that meet the evolving needs of today’s players, but at what cost?

Using Artificial Intelligence to recognise problem gambling behaviours

Analysing player behaviours using ground-breaking Artificial Intelligence, Future Anthem has found that the most common risky behaviours found during player sessions are erratic play and staking up.

Erratic play is where a player’s stake will oscillate quickly throughout a session. Staking up is where there is a noticeable consistent increase in the size of a player’s stake over the course of a session.

In addition, we have also found that game components such as RTP, variance and hit rate do not have a direct correlation with risk, which may come as quite a surprise, as there are many who have called out these elements as potential pressure points in the past. While there is no doubt that some games have higher levels of risk play occur on them, it seems likely this is primarily due to other factors such as promotional material, bonuses and environmental factors.

The discoveries detailed in our white paper have been made using Anthemetrics, the industry’s first Game Data Science platform which uses AI, Cloud technology and Game Data Science.

Anthemetrics ingests billions of gaming transactions across thousands of online games to transform, process, store and manage game data that delivers player predictions and behaviours in real-time.

Technology allows operators to act swiftly and decisively 

Using AI, our state-of-the-art machine learning models analyse every single bet a player makes to identify when they start to play in a risky manner. These models monitor four main areas, customer spend, patterns of spend, time spent gambling and gambling behaviour indicators.

Players are allocated a score based on their individual level of risk, this then sees them placed in one of three clusters that are accessible via a Safer Play dashboard… A sustainable cluster, a monitor cluster or a high-risk cluster. Those in the latter two clusters are automatically placed on the radar of the operator, streamlining the entire process.

Our models feedback to operators in real-time, allowing them to react swiftly and decisively, interacting with any players that have displayed signs of gambling harm, depending on the level of risk that has been detected.

We’ve effectively found a way to help operators comply with these latest regulations during a time that safer and responsible gambling is on the lips of everyone in the industry. What’s more, we’ve detected risky play in casino games earlier in 71% of cases which is a huge leap forward in the drive towards making gambling safer and more responsible.