RTG London – sports betting integrity: Will microbetting make things more difficult?
Gambling Insider was in attendance at the Regulating the Game event in London this week, and leading the ‘sports betting integrity and match-fixing risks’ talk was Steve Paine, Director at Evolve Sports Integrity.
The main subject of the discussion was to explore what steps gambling regulators and betting operators can take to identify risks, and raise standards within betting integrity practices.
At the conference, Gambling Insider asked the speaker whether the emergence of microbetting, from the likes of companies such as Betr, will affect betting integrity.
Paine responded: “I think criminals would look for any opportunity to exploit sports or betting markets, or any other sector like the financial sector or some commercial sectors. I certainly don’t think that a new market or a new product is going to be immune to that.
“I think the challenge is for operators and regulators to understand what the risks look like in that area, how they can tackle it – and again, I know there’s a lot of chat this morning about them and us – but I think betting integrity is one area where you can really have a lot of collaboration.
“I think it only really works when operators are reporting the right kind of information and it only really works when regulators know the right kind of things to ask for. I think having those collaborations about identifying what the risks look like, it benefits both parties because operators don’t want to be falling foul of fraudulent activity.”
When summarising what operators can do to prevent infiltration from criminals in new markets, Paine continued:
“From a commercial and reputational perspective, they don’t want that to infiltrate markets; and regulatory, of course, we want to keep crime out of our betting markets.
“Therefore, I think part of it has to be an ongoing dialogue and that’s not just the microbetting aspect, but any kind of new innovation that comes along because there will be a number of vulnerabilities.”
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