Q&A: How the International Betting Integrity Association is taking sporting integrity to an international audience

ESSA (Sports betting integrity) is an operator led trade association which has worked to deal with issues relating to sporting integrity and combatting match fixing since 2005. However, as new jurisdictions including US, Latam and emerging markets in the rest of the world have moved to embrace sports betting, the association has had to revaluate its role in working to combat corruption in sport globally. This culminates today in the rebranding and relaunch of ESSA as the International Betting Integrity Association.

EGR Compliance: What does relaunching and rebranding ESSA into the International Betting Integrity Association bring to the table?

Khalid Ali (KA): To give you a bit of background, last year we undertook an internal consultation with our members. We also spoke with key stakeholders within the sports and several gambling authorities, just asking them what we were doing right and what we were getting wrong.

The feedback we received was actually very positive, everyone who responded was happy with broadly happy with everything that we were doing. There was however one area where they all thought we should probably look at and that was the identity of the association. The feeling was that it probably didn’t really reflect the name that reflects who we were and what we were doing.

This is something we’d thought about five years previously in 2013, because originally in 2005, we were called the European Sports Security Association. That was a name initially thought up by several bookmakers during the earliest days of the association. When I joined in 2008, one of the things I looked at was whether the name was suitable or not but as it turned out we stuck with it for five years to see how it would develop.

In 2013 we decided that it probably wasn’t the right name, everybody knew us as ESSA so we would use the acronym ESSA and see how it that would work over the next five years. In addition to the consultation, several other big things happened in sports betting in 2018. Several betting markets across the world began to open up in LatAm the US and India and number of our members were also starting to get licences in these territories abroad as well.

EGR Compliance: How has betting integrity changed since ESSA was founded?

KA: Drawing on my own personal experience, any time I went to a sports betting conference in the past integrity was always the last thing that anyone would ever discuss, but in the five or six years since it’s become a headline issue. Last year the expert European group that has been created for gambling regulators debated nearly 10 issues concerning sports betting, number one was problem gambling, number two was sponsorship/advertising and number three was integrity, which shows how much it has changed.

We were the first integrity association to have a monitoring alert platform. We were the first ones to put out a quarterly report highlighting our integrity stats and we’re the first ones to put together an education campaign to educate athletes which has gone out over to 30,000 athletes across Europe.

So, we’ve been really kind of leading this, but we just felt that maybe from a kind of an identity point of view that people didn’t really get to know us well. Part of the rebrand is also to get more new members on board especially ones from outside of Europe and especially in markets where our members are currently going into. In addition, we to increase the awareness with both our existing regulators and to reach out to new ones.

EGR Compliance: What do you think are the key areas where betting integrity suffers?

KA: There are a couple of big challenges we’re facing, the first thing is that we need more regulators to ask their licensees to take part in the monitoring process, it doesn’t have to be with us, it can be any association. We need to have regulators and operators be a part of an information sharing network on integrity and its slowly becoming a reality. We’ve seen this happen in Europe and it has also notably happened in New Jersey, where one of the requirements is that you must be part of a monitoring and alert platform if you want to get a licence.

The second big challenge and something we are going to be working on over the next few years is that we still have a lot of sports betting operators that aren’t part of a trade association, aren’t sharing data and monitoring. We need to change that if we are going to have a safer game.

EGR Compliance: What for you is the most important part of having a global approach to match fixing?

KA: Match fixing in sport is not a national issue it’s a transnational issue. There’s a lot of different components involved from a kind a match fixing point of view from the way in which criminal gangs are organised, to the way they place bets and in a lot of cases that there’s not going to just be one operator involved there could be multiple operators involved in many jurisdictions.

We need to have as many eyes and ears within our association picking this up and trying to prevent these guys from corrupting support and trying to defraud our operators and preventing our members customers from getting a fair bet.

EGR Compliance: How many operators have signed up to become members of the International Betting Integrity Association?

KA: We have about 50-member firms currently, the bulk of which are based within the EU. However, many of these firms have expanded into other markets globally, such as America which has increased the amount of data coming into our monitoring platforms and increasing our scope of operations.

One of the things we’ve really noticed is the value of having smaller regional operators on the monitoring platform. To give you an example, we have Stoiximan in Greece, which has a great understanding of the Greek and Cypriot markets. Playing this out, when they raise an alert on the monitoring platform all our other operator partners will know that it’s a serious issue because of their unique knowledge of that market.

This unique knowledge is something we want to try to emulate across other markets to get this kind of regional operators as members. However, that can be challenging because of course those operators will have to sign up to a code of conduct and go through a due diligence process to see if they meet the standards required to become part of the association.