How GiG is incorporating sustainability into its business model

With concerns about the role that big business plays at the centre of the community becoming ever more present, many firms must justify their existence in terms of what they give back and how efficiently they achieve their business aims.

Sustainability has gone from a farming and environmental term to one of the key business practices of large companies, including those operators which have successfully achieved listings on stock exchanges across the world. As an international operator, Gaming Innovation Group (GiG) faces several challenges in maintaining a sustainable business model, ranging from the player journey to its environmental footprint.

GiG sustainability and IR manager Liesbeth Oost chats to EGR Intel about all things sustainability and how the Malta-headquartered firm is incorporating this into its business model.

EGR Intel: What does a sustainability manager do?

Liesbeth Oost (LO): A key part of what I do, as a sustainability and IR manager, in both the short term and long term, is working to develop a sustainability culture within the firm, i.e. a culture of social responsibility to ensure compliance, promote responsible gambling, adopt best practices and to improve the social impact of our industry.

I work with all departments to create synergies between the different stakeholders within GiG on sustainability topics, monitor progress on targets, setting sustainability standards, oversee the adoption of industry best practice and promote the company’s sustainable culture and compile the annual sustainability report for the company. The goal of the sustainability report is to explain how GiG runs a sustainable business, our key focus areas and how we conduct our business in a responsible way for all stakeholders.

Promoting sustainability is about reflecting the best values of the company, so that individuals either externally or internally understand what we are doing in these areas. Internally, this makes a huge difference to our employees, as a lot of them are among the so-called millennial age group (between 22-35) and they are curious about the company they work for and the impact the firm makes on the society and environment. Employees want to feel good about their employer and, in an industry that rather unfairly gets a bad press within the wider media, being able to say something positive makes all the difference.

EGR Intel: What does sustainability mean to GiG?

LO: The company’s financial sustainability is key to our business and strategy. Based on that, we have three priority areas in respect of sustainability: promoting a fair and safe egaming environment, ensuring all marketing and advertising is conducted responsibly, and encouraging GiG employees to thrive. We focus our sustainability strategy on areas most relevant to our business, at the heart of which is responsible gambling. The sustainability report itself starts with our core business strategy, our objectives for sustainability and our financial sustainability. GiG is listed on both the Oslo Stock Exchange and at Nasdaq Stockholm, which means we conduct annual reporting in respect of the company’s sustainability strategy. This reporting requirement forms the backbone of the whole company strategy towards sustainability.

Looking at the areas one at a time, developing and promoting a fair and safe egaming environment can be things like what we do to safeguard our customer data and IT systems and things that put customer protection and responsible gambling at the centre of our operations. Responsible marketing and advertising are very important priority areas for GiG based on the size of the company and the different verticals we operate in across the whole value chain in egaming; be it our B2B business through platform, sports betting, online casino and media services, but also in our B2C brands.

We are not only choosing to focus on operations, for example, where sustainability is more or less 90% based on responsible gaming. We realise that sustainability means and can mean something different for every business and every industry. As a result, you need to do a very clear analysis of your stakeholders and what they expect from you and how you can progress towards these objectives. This analysis, once completed, forms a large part of the sustainability report, the production of which is part of my role as sustainability manager.

The third priority area is to encourage employees to train and develop their skills, because if you train and develop your employees, they support the whole business and each other. In addition to the three core priority areas, we also operate sustainability management in other areas such as corporate social responsibility and environmental management.

EGR Intel: What is involved in GiG’s environmental sustainability policy?

LO: GiG operates in the digital economy, so our carbon footprint is relatively low in comparison to companies that have a supply chain starting with sourcing raw materials. However, we also have several policies and practices in place designed to reduce our footprint even further.

We introduced two travel-free months in 2018, whereby we encouraged our employees not to travel to reduce our carbon footprint and use video conferencing to address the need to communicate between each of the offices. We promote paperless working, which was just one sheet of printed paper per employee per day in 2018 and we also resell our old IT equipment, donating the profits to local charities. Within the office itself, we have smart lighting, only use reusable containers for food and drinks, and have an in-office recycling programme, where all waste is separated into recyclable materials.

We regularly update our employees about the environmental sustainability side of the business because they are genuinely interested in hearing about it. It is great to see that a group of employees made use of the offered time off to do voluntary work during the World Cleanup Day.

GiG’s Malta headquarters features two purpose-built slides representing the firm’s sense of playfulness

EGR Intel: In what ways does an effective regulatory compliance regime allow GiG to be sustainable?

LO: Regulatory compliance frameworks aim to make gambling safer and create a sustainable player experience. As previously stated, one of our sustainability priority areas is to create a fair and safe egaming environment, thereby creating a sustainable customer experience and journey among our players. For us, an effective regulatory regime enables us to do this by clearly defining what we as an operator and supplier need to do in order to remain compliant with regulations. These are the minimum regulatory standards we adhere to as an operator, however it also enables us to identify areas where we can go above and beyond regulations in order to achieve this priority.

By providing a safer gambling environment based on our desire to act responsibly in everything we do, it enables us to build long-term and loyal relationships with our customers and end users, which as an operator is very important. Building customer relationships in a long-term and safe way ensures player gambling remains a leisure and entertainment activity and doesn’t lapse into at-risk gambling. This means providing the right tools, monitoring your customers, interacting and using different predictive models to make sure that the player journey is safe for them. By the same token, this also means responding quickly on responsible gambling cases to minimise the harm to players.

Both as an online operator and a software supplier providing online gambling platforms and services, we insist our B2B partners comply with technical, legislative and responsible marketing demands. GiG is a technology company and it comes naturally to support sustainability through investing in research and innovative technology.

EGR Intel: How can operators generally enforce a sustainability-led approach to egaming?

LO: We believe that promoting a whole business culture of sustainability and responsibility is very important. All our stakeholders need to understand what sustainability means for GiG and how that translates on a day-to-day basis. It’s challenging because there are so many different stakeholders, from our customers, employees, investors, other external stakeholders, even the regulators we work with in our various jurisdictions, all need to know GiG and what we stand for. For us it’s about all working from the same page and working towards creating that culture and environment of social responsibility. We need the right knowledge and the right individuals within all the different departments because responsible gambling and sustainability should not be limited to just those departments, it should be a mindset shared everywhere in the business.

Sustainability also goes into topics such as diversity and inclusivity and the individual policies that GiG has in place at other levels. These include transparency, employee engagement, professional growth, supporting local charities and communities and the management of our environmental footprint. It’s all part of long-term sustainability for the business. The report is produced in line with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) for sustainability reporting standards, with each individual disclosure made measured against a corresponding standard.

We also declare how many training courses are available to our employees internally through GiG Academy, how many training hours have been spent there and how many classroom training courses were given to our employees within any given year. This is the first year we’ve produced such a report, and we are committed to progressively working towards our sustainability goals and report on progress and development in annual sustainability reporting. In doing so, we make use of tracking data and statistics to analyse, monitor and improve key indicators. Currently, we’re building an area on our website completely dedicated to this.

EGR Intel: Where do you see the next big innovations in sustainability among egaming operators?

LO: It’s a good question and something we continuously discuss internally. We believe that further optimising predictive models to deal with customer interactions in real time is something which will be a source for future innovation in sustainability, together with smart monitoring based on AI predictive models. Companies are becoming better at informing and educating their customers on safer gambling patterns by increasing understanding and visibility of end-users’ gambling behaviour, understanding game-play time, money spent, and the different types of products and verticals they use. This forms very important statistics and understanding to create a safer and more entertaining gambling experience.

Understanding the consumer gambling angle is something that will emerge over the coming years. As we become better at informing and educating our customers on safer gambling patterns and focus on player sustainability, we will as egaming firms be able to retain customers for a longer period of time as a result of creating a sustainable player experience. It’s about creating that bond and trust so that they will come to us for advice on their gambling and thereby reduce instances of gambling-related harm. A closer bond between service provider and customer has been shown in past research to actively prolong the customer journey and also making them less likely to move to another operator.

EGR Intel: What else is GiG working on with regards to sustainability?

LO: GiG works with several research institutions and charities, using our knowledge of the egaming industry to aid them in their research projects. One of our most recent collaborations is with Bournemouth University on two projects.

The first one is titled ‘Empowering responsible online gambling with predictive, real-time, persuasive and interactive intervention’. This project aims to design software and research facilities which retrieve the gambling history of subscribed gamblers and help them visualise this in various forms to inform their decisions on their gambling behaviour.

The second project is titled ‘Participatory design of interactive persuasive gambling awareness: Enabling gambler-centered innovation’ (GamInnovate). The projects’ focus is on participatory design sessions with gamblers, supporting GiG’s player’s protection team to improve email templates and onsite messages to enhance conscious and responsible gambling.

We’ve taken an active role in bringing the Responsible Gambling Week to Malta, working together with the UK-based event organisers. Since a lot of Malta-based firms have UK licences, we’d like to do something here for this reason. So, we set up a group among Maltese-based operators. There’s a lot of enthusiasm for having this event also in Malta, so much so that we now have each day of the week assigned to a different operator organising responsible gambling-related workshops, trainings and panel discussions. We’ve devised a programme of events throughout the week, and the Malta Gaming Authority will wrap up the week For us, this shows the industry can collaborate on responsible gambling to the benefit of all.