Early Identification of Financial Stress Provides Window To Interrupt Gambling Harm: RG Panel

Picture it: America, 2026: 

A 14-year-old asks his mother to open a prediction market account for him. Thinking it is just another video game platform, she does. And she links it to her checking and PayPal accounts. Fast-forward a few months and $40,000 in deposits later, the teen trader is in treatment for a gambling disorder. Mom, meanwhile, has learned what a “prediction market” actually is.

“When you think about gambling-related financial harm, that’s a tremendous strain on any family,” said Dr. Timothy Fong, after sharing his patient’s story. He spoke last week during a webinar hosted by the Kindbridge Research Institute’s Financial Stability and Responsible Gambling (FSRG) Initiative.

Fong is a professor of psychiatry at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and co-director of the school’s Gambling Studies Program. And like his “Financial Health, Gambling, and Prevention: A Cross-Industry Conversation” co-panelists, he is also a member of FSRG’s working group.

“The mother said she didn’t notice it because there was no debt,” he recounted.  

It was just drained from her checking account. The young man had no sense that this was creating any sort of problem at all, because he doesn’t know the value and concept of money, because he’s 14 years old. This was all digital.”

“Gambling-related financial harm can show up in a million different ways,” he added. 

“The most obvious is when someone says to me, ‘I am really straining and suffering because of the money I lost, spent, or owe.’ But that’s not always the case.”

Financial Stress, Gambling Harm Aggravated by Frictionless World

As gambling becomes embedded in everyday life, gambling-related financial stress is increasingly visible across healthcare, consumer, and finance sectors. Yet, as FSRG noted in the webinar details, these perspectives are rarely discussed together. 

Moderated by FSRG project lead Kary Carbone, the Financial Literacy Month event convened public health, finance, and gambling industry leaders for just that purpose. The discussion explored insights from FSRG’s 2026 Insights Report and presented early recognition of financial stress as a potential entry point to interrupt the escalation of gambling harm.

TransUnion’s Director of Research and Consulting Greg Schlichter said gambling-related financial problems can start slowly before becoming more serious issues.

“Consumer financial stress is one of exponential growth,” Schlichter explained. 

What starts off as a little bit of tightness… can quickly compound to a serious problem with long-term ramifications. That’s why you want to identify these things early. One missed payment, no matter how small, is going to be a red flag on your credit report for at least seven years.”

Colorado Lottery Player Health Manager Amanda Quintana believes the biggest shift is the disappearance of friction. Where there used to be natural pauses — the need to travel to a location to gamble, visit an ATM — there’s now instant, unfettered access.

“Now it’s more instant or continuous with just that digital environment,” said Quintana, who is also on the National Council on Problem Gambling’s board of directors. 

Gambling, she added, can become embedded in everyday finances through digital wallets or linked accounts. As a result, risk can build faster, and players may struggle to recognize what’s happening.

A lot of this comes down to what feels like normal behavior for players versus what might actually be a signal for risk, and that gap is where we have a real opportunity to intervene earlier.”

Healthcare Providers Face Financial Knowledge Gap

Quintana also voiced her issue with the industry’s habit of referring to gambling as ‘gaming’ and other obfuscating vocabulary. She welcomed the recent progress toward accurate terminology and communicating risk.

“We’re really at least seeing a shift in the field where more people are referring to gambling as gambling,” Quintana described. 

There are a lot more operators who are at least trying to take more transparent steps to communicate directly with a player and say this activity carries risk. There are tools that you can use. There are budgeting tools, there are these tools maybe that can be helpful for a player, to at least share that responsibility.”

The goal of FRSG isn’t to eliminate all risk. Rather, it’s to reduce preventable harm through collaboration among systems already involved in financial decision-making. By moving from insight to action, the initiative offers a path toward a place where early intervention and cross-collaboration are the norm. And, ultimately, fewer individuals experience gambling-related financial harm.

Fong noted that many of his patients don’t recognize gambling’s impact on their finances and think it’s normal to live paycheck to paycheck. However, while paycheck-to-paycheck living is not ideal, it is normal for many Americans. 

Still, that oversight doesn’t weaken Fong’s argument that changing our financial conversations and asking tough questions would be a step in the right direction.

He also acknowledged that people in his profession often have limited understanding of financial matters, creating a knowledge gap that needs to close.

“Many of us as healthcare providers just don’t realize how frictionless this world is between the finance world and the gambling world,” he said.

We literally have 350 million casinos in America right now… in every single one of our pockets.”