Key points:
- Stage one of the pilot is now complete
- 95% of the assessments met the first criteria of a frictionless assessment
The Gambling Commission’s Director of Major Policy Projects and Evaluation Helen Rhodes has given insights into financial risk assessments after the completion of the first phase of its current pilot.
It was in May last year when the Gambling Commission announced the pilot test for frictionless financial risk assessments, whereby data from gambling companies and credit reference agencies would be used, with the assessment not being rolled out in a live environment during its pilot phase.
The pilot commenced in September 2024 and will run to April 2025, with stage one of three now complete, which looked at historical data of inactive customers, helping to give insights into the data quality and understanding, and any implementation issues.
Good to know: In last year's issue of Gambling Insider's Payments Focus, Richard Williams, Partner at Keystone Law and Tamsin Blow, a partner at CMS, gave insights into the latest updates on affordability checks in the UK
Stage one has been referred to as “a pilot of the pilot,” and included 530,000 assessments involving three credit reference agencies for approximately 300,000 accounts for the relevant year. Of these assessments, 95% met the first success criteria of a frictionless assessment.
Looking at those 5% of assessments that were not conduced frictionlessly, just over 4% were due to the credit reference agency not identifying the customer, with no information available, and less than 1% due to data formatting issues, invalid data or duplications in the data.
Reflecting on stage one's findings, the Commission explained that in the next stages, more can be done to help operators understand different credit reference agency systems to help assess findings from the assessments.
In other news from the regulator, it recently published a report looking into the relationship between gambling activities and Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI) scores, based on findings from the Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB).
