Safer Gambling
Ensuring the highest possible levels of player safety and protection is the best way of guaranteeing our long-term success. Our technology enables us to continuously upgrade and personalise our protections for customers. That is why we launched our Advanced Responsibility & Care™ (“ARC™”) programme. Through ARC™ we will proactively implement a number of additional checks on customers at various thresholds in the customer journey.
In 2020 we were recognised as the Safer Gambling Operator of the Year at the industry's premier awards event, the EGR Operator Awards, with the independent judging panel recognising Entain's leadership on the issue. We also picked up the title of Socially Responsible Sportsbook of the Year from the leading industry publication, SBC.
Our approach to safer gambling ensures that we maintain best practice standards across the business and, where possible, the industry as a whole. Entain is fully aligned with the UK Gambling Commission’s principal objectives to ensure that gambling is crime free, fair and open, and children and vulnerable people are protected. We commit to these objectives across the whole of our business wherever we operate. To reinforce this commitment, from 2021 a responsible gambling metric is being incorporated into our annual group wide bonus conditions
Providing an exciting and fair leisure experience
Gambling is an exciting adult leisure pursuit and we want our customers to enjoy betting and gaming with us. Our customers come from all economic groups and are all over the world. At Entain, we are committed to offering the best customer experience and so we put customers at the heart of our business, providing them with an enjoyable, efficient, secure, fair and socially responsible service. All our employees are trained to support this commitment, and to check our performance, we continually seek the views of our customers and encourage feedback.
ARC™
Our new ARC™ (Advance Responsibility and Care™) programme is in the initial implementation phase. Through ARC™ we have significantly extended behavioral indicators used to identify players potentially at risk and we are now developing models using more than three times the previous number.
We believe ARC™ will provide unprecedented safeguards for customers of our online sports betting and gaming brands by minimising problems before they arise. This promises to revolutionise conventional thinking around responsible gaming and usher in a new era of more personalised and proactive, technology-driven player protection, widely applicable across many forms of online sports betting and gaming entertainment.
Changing for the Bettor
ARC™ builds on our award winning safer gambling strategy Changing for the Bettor, which is comprised of seven core pillars as set out below.
- Understanding the problem and best solutions – Including a 5 year, multi-million-dollar project with the Division on Addiction, at the Cambridge Health Alliance, a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital.
- Educating our key stakeholders – including the national roll out of youth education programmes with the charity GamCare – the largest project of its kind in the UK, as well as a, fully evaluated, state- school awareness campaign with EPIC Risk Management. We also co-fund the GamCare/YGAM youth education programme with other large operators – spanning 4 years.
- Promoting responsible attitudes – leading the industry in agreeing a ban on pre-watershed gambling adverts on television, around live sports (the whistle to whistle ban). We are also the only operator to unilaterally end shirt sponsorship and perimeter boarding in UK football.
- Empowering customers – conducted a full review of our safer gambling tools and making these more visible, easier to use and a more important part of our customer experience, and implementing new tools which include curfews, cooling off periods and maximum limits on slots.
- Funding treatment for those in need – first to announce a commitment to donate 1% of our Gross Gambling Yield (GGY) by 2022 to research, education and treatment (RET). The rest of industry has since followed our lead and committed to do the same by 2023.
- Championing responsible product design – developing more responsible product design principles.
- Driving cultural change within our business – ensuring that a safer gambling approach underpins all aspects of our business. In the UK we partner with EPIC Risk Management to provide Responsible Gambling training to our colleagues.
For more detail on the actions we are taking to bring this strategy to life click here.