Pressure makes diamonds: Regulating to innovate?
Hosted by London Tech Leaders in February 2025, Aviation House, opposite Holborn Station in London, played host to an event titled ‘Responsibility in gaming and gambling technology.’ Part of the event included a panel, moderated by former Camelot CTO David Crawford, with its participants being: Florian Diederichsen, CTO at OpenBet; Kirsty Caldwell, Founder and CEO at Betsmart Consulting; Leon Sucharov, CTIO at Playtech; and Sam Douglas, Director of Safer Gambling at The Hippodrome Casino.
Here are some of the highlights…
What actionable steps can leaders take to ensure their companies stay ahead of evolving regulations, but also societal expectations in gaming?
Caldwell: One that is really important and is often overlooked is engaging in the consultation process. So, when the regulator is looking to change regulation, they will go to the industry and ask for their thoughts. They ask quite specific questions and these can give a really good indication of what might be coming down the line. Compliance should be having the resources and time to be engaging those responses, but they should also be engaging the rest of the business, including management, to ensure everybody is implementing and trying to drive how that regulation might look going forward.
Similarly, engaging with trade bodies, working groups that form to build industry codes of conduct often preempt regulation or guide regulation. Similarly, the regulator uses pilots with various different operators. There’s a data-sharing pilot going on at the moment with six or seven medium-sized operators (GamProtect).
Those operators have an advantage, to see what is potentially coming down the line
Do regulators need to go and ask people questions?
Sucharov: I think, very often, regulators don’t know what is going to work or what the impact is going to be, especially from a quantifiable perspective. That is one way we can help. For example, Playtech runs in 30 or more regulated markets with different rules, different behaviour and we’ve got a lot of data about how players actually behave. We can provide quantitative feedback in general and in response to questions from regulators where they otherwise would have to try and figure out on their own what might be the best approach.
From our perspective, because we see more and more regulation in different places, and as technology providers, we don’t want to provide 30 different bits of technology. We provide one platform that can be configured to support regulation, which is very complex to do. But, it does mean we can deliver individual solutions quite easily. What it also means is that, when new regulation comes along, we find it important to follow the spirit of the regulation, not the letter, and look at it from the player’s perspective. The reason is, yes, it’s the ethical and good thing to do, but from a pragmatic business perspective, that regulation will probably change in six months or a year. It will probably become tighter, and if there’s a reason to change it for the players’ benefit, that change will probably happen. It’s much easier to engineer something right the first time than to return and change it years later.
We’ve heard about all of the challenges, some of the benefits, but in your experience, what tech is available? Are there systems available? Is this still early days?
Douglas: These systems are evolving all the time. There are a lot of systems to identify. But we’re working in a land-based environment, so the best system we have is face-to-face conversations. We can utilise tech systems to support us, to provide assurance to the board, the regulators, but that has to be supplemented by humans making the correct decisions. It’s all about the face-to- face judgments of people, to give us that information.
Caldwell: In my perspective, there are a multitude of systems available to help operators with management. A lot of the problem for operators is working out which is the best system for them. To do that, you need empowered compliance teams with the right amount of resources, quality teams and supporters at senior management level to make sure they are accessing the correct systems. Secondly, many operators invest a lot of money into our system and then don’t use the system to the best of its ability because they don’t have the supporting processes. They don’t have the configuration set up.
There’s probably a lot of money invested into software which ends up as dead money for operators
We’ve established that regulation is something that is maybe a necessarily evil or maybe a force of good, but it’s going to stay the same. We’re all going to look at how we deliver responsible games, but not stifle innovation. Leon, you have innovation in your job title.
Sucharov: It’s tough for individual licensing. Technology is expensive. The difference, particularly in this area with very sensitive data, is that it’s hard work. Looking in terms that you can understand, marks of harm and how to classify different user types, and then trying to understand what to do. Even if you’ve identified a person, what do you do about it? How do you engage with them?
With technical responsible gaming tools, you have to enable and configure them. We spend lots of time doing that and we spend time working with researchers and have a machine-learning model, we’ve got a product, and that’s quite innovative in and of itself… The other side I would say is innovation in policies.
When we’re designing a new casino feature or platform feature, from our perspective, it helps to bring in compliance. What we don’t want to do is spend a lot of time developing a product, put it out, only for somebody to think, is this a game or a game category that people are going to consider to be high-risk? We don’t want to put something out and then have knee-jerk regulation that is going to either require us to remove it or change it so significantly that it’s a shadow of its former self. We bring the compliance team in early to try and make sure we don’t put games or content out there that’s going to be particularly difficult.
But that does sound like you’re accommodating it rather than fostering and living under it. Sam, what’s your view on this? Is it foster or stifle innovation?
Douglas: If it’s stifling innovation, it’s potentially stifling innovation that shouldn’t happen. If there’s exploitative games or high-risk games, maybe they shouldn’t be in the industry. In many ways you can see that encouraged. We talk a lot about food, enjoyment and entertainment today. We’re all about the experience, about coming in and enjoying yourself, and through that, that should help them play in a positive way.
We talk about positive play, about people monitoring their own behaviour. That can happen whether that is online or land-based. You can build in features in a game that help people monitor their play, that encourages people to take a break, encourages enjoyment in storytelling without them being exploitative and without them being high-risk.
I would always argue that we should encourage innovation. Innovation should be about working within the bounds of what is acceptable, the bounds of what is right, and to do that effectively with a group of people enjoying themselves.
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