Q&A: Gamesys chairman on taking bold responsible gambling steps during Covid-19 outbreak

Operators around the world are feeling the strain while dealing with coronavirus lockdown measures. While many have reported a negative financial impact on business, other verticals have experienced an uptick.

Amid the turmoil, Gamesys Group last week reported an impressive 19% Q1 revenue rise to £155.3m.

EGR Intel speaks to executive chairman Neil Goulden about the firm’s first quarter numbers, its Covid-19 contingency plan and why it is going above and beyond in the responsible gambling arena to protect both staff and players.

Neil Goulden

EGR Intel: Gamesys has taken the very big decision to stop TV and radio advertising, how long have these measures been under consideration and what did the decision-making process involve?

Neil Goulden (NG): We’ve been looking at the implications of Covid-19 in general terms, our initial thinking was how do we make sure our staff are safe and looked after? We did a lot of pre-planning for that, in so much as 80% of our staff were already working from home when the prime minister said people should try to where they can. It was a seamless transfer and after that we spent a lot of time making sure all our staff were content, because it’s a very different working environment for them. Outside of our staff, our other main priority was maintaining services, making sure the system works so our customers could enjoy their gambling as normal.

As things developed, we wondered if player behaviour would change if we went into a lengthy lockdown. We felt over a period that on a precautionary basis it was right to suspend some of our UK marketing practices. We’re not seeing any increase in problem gambling, we just felt that with people at home together with their families, untargeted marketing with TV is problematic because we don’t know who’s watching it. With radio, you don’t know who’s listening and with direct mail you don’t know who’s going to open the letter. In addition, with algorithm-led programmatic online advertising, you don’t know where it’s going to land.

We’re getting a lot of very positive feedback from customers following the measures we’ve implemented. The first one that became very popular was that we stopped all of our gaming sites at 8pm on Thursday and showed pictures of our chat room staff clapping for the NHS and for carers. Customers thought it was great that everything just stopped for 10 minutes to recognise the carers, so we’ve done a lot of work in that sphere and the work we’ve done to support Women’s Aid is a part of that.

EGR Intel: What sort of impact do you think it will have on UK revenue?

NG: It’s too early to tell but we don’t think it will have any noticeable impact, it’s purely a precautionary measure as we have said in our trading statements. As a business, we were trading strongly before Covid-19 and we haven’t seen any material changes in patterns of play, so for us it’s business as usual. We are in a very privileged position whereby our business is largely unaffected. Obviously, operationally it’s been impacted with our staff working from home, but from a revenue perspective our business is largely unaffected by the pandemic. Therefore, we just feel that we’re doing the right things as a responsible corporate citizen in what is a difficult time. We don’t want to take advantage of our privileged position; we want to use it to be a good corporate citizen.

EGR Intel: Do you plan to implement any furloughing of staff or any executive level pay cuts due to the pandemic?

NG: We haven’t furloughed any staff and we’ve also given pay rises to all of our employees as we originally intended to on 1 April. The payroll went through as normal and bonus payments for last year were made as normal, so we’re trading as normal and paying as normal. In fact, we’re recruiting as normal as well, with several vacancies that we are looking to fill at the moment.

EGR Intel: In what ways has the group increased its responsible gambling activities following the lockdown?

NG: We’ve increased the resources and capability of our responsible gambling team to manage the growth in activity on our sites. We’re aiming to ensure that everyone continues to enjoy Gamesys brands in a responsible manner and safe environment. As part of this, our staff have focused on developing an increased awareness of player time and spend across all our sites through a combination of human and automated monitoring of players. We’ve changed our algorithms to lower the thresholds at which we would automatically interact with a player and we’ve increased the proactive messaging about deposit limits. This has resulted in a 45% increase in the number of players implementing deposit limits since the lockdown began. It’s also seen player engagement in our chat rooms rise by 38% and a 10% rise in people playing our online bingo games on a non-wagering basis. It’s good that all those proactive and reactive measures are working together. Initially, players very much felt we were intruding, asking why the firm was now asking these questions in a more obvious way, but now they realise why we’re doing it and we’re getting good feedback from staff and customers.

EGR Intel: The Swedish government has announced it will look to introduce a mandatory SEK5,000 deposit limit as well as restricting bonuses to SEK100 for the remainder of 2020. What effect do you think this will have on your Vera&John revenue?

NG: The Swedish market already had bonus restrictions in place so the only new thing is the introduction of proper deposit limits. I understand from reports these aren’t fully introduced yet, and are only at consultation stage, and still must go through a legislative process. I think it won’t have any material impact on our business, and considering where our volumes are in Sweden, I suspect that most people will be depositing less than the deposit limit introduced already. Personally, I don’t like arbitrary limits because it’s not related to the affordability of an individual customer, and therefore you are impinging on the right of an individual to decide what they can afford. In principle, I’m not in favour of those sorts of blanket restrictions, but I don’t think they will have any impact on our business.

EGR Intel: How is the launch of your second brand in Spain going? Has it been curtailed by the coronavirus pandemic?

NG: They’ve introduced several restrictions during the pandemic on gambling operators, some of which are quite similar to what we are doing in the UK voluntarily. We’re just making sure we stick within the regulations and the requirements. We weren’t given much notice that these regulations were going to be introduced, so the team worked really hard. We were uninterrupted and live under the new regulatory standards, so it’s just a matter of getting used to the new regulations until the lockdown is lifted.