Richard Flint: Industry must learn from Sky Bet failings ahead of GAMSTOP
Flint tells EGR his company’s £1m financial penalty should serve as a lesson for other operators ahead of the UK’s online self-exclusion scheme
Sky Betting & Gaming (SB&G) CEO Richard Flint has urged the sector to learn from his company’s recent self-exclusion failings to prevent any “industry-wide” problems when the UK’s nationwide online scheme is rolled out.
The operator was recently hit with a £1m financial penalty from the UK Gambling Commission for a number of failings dating back to 2016, including allowing 736 self-excluded customers to open and use duplicate accounts to gamble.
The voluntary settlement was announced as UK-facing operators prepare for the launch of GAMSTOP, a nationwide online self-exclusion scheme which is expected to be implemented in the next few months.
GAMSTOP, which was originally scheduled to go live before the end of the year, will for the first time enable customers to self-exclude from all operators licensed by the Gambling Commission in a single step.
And speaking exclusively to EGR Intel, Flint said the Yorkshire-based operator’s voluntary settlement should serve as warning to the rest of the UK sector ahead of the roll-out.
“The industry has to be careful with the implementation of GAMSTOP that we learn from this incident and we make it sufficiently difficult for people to have duplicate accounts, because then it becomes an industry-wide problem, rather than just a company-specific one,” the CEO said.
Sky Betting & Gaming CEO, Richard Flint
“GAMSTOP is a good thing but I think we need to be aware it won’t be perfect on day one and it will have these sort of issues, even if they are not exactly the same.”
In Sky Bet’s recent failings, 50,000 self-excluded customers received marketing material by email, mobile text or a push notification within a mobile app, while 36,748 self-excluded customers did not have their account balance funds returned to them on account closure.
However, Flint said that while he regretted SB&G’s mistakes, he was confident the industry was still broadly moving in the right direction and his company would lead the way with regards to social responsibility.
“I think things are getting better. In a football match, just because you get a yellow or red card, which you might not like or find painful, most players still think there should be a referee,” he said.
“I think the Gambling Commission is doing the right sort of things across the board, and as a minimum we should have divested ourselves of the funds from those who had self-excluded and it’s reasonable for us to pay on top of that.
“We agree with the findings and we think there should be fines for companies when appropriate.”
Read Flint’s full public response to Sky Bet’s recent financial penalty here.