Bet365 and tombola look to affiliate compliance with Dutch RG code

Bet365 and tombola are among a number of new Dutch licensees requiring affiliates to sign up to stringent compliance checking of all their programmes operating in the Dutch market.

The duo, along with Bingoal and BetCity, who received their licences as part of the initial 10 given by the Dutch Gambling Authority (KSA) have signed up to the KVA quality mark, which checks affiliate compliance with Dutch gambling standards.

The KVA mark, the brainchild of Dutch law firm XY Legal Solutions BV works as part of a wider Code for Responsible Advertising and Recruitment of Online Casino Affiliates.

The code measures affiliate compliance against five pillars, which mimic the KSA’s own objectives; reducing supply to illegal operators by only featuring links to licensed operators, being responsible in usage of advertising channels and a “careful and balanced” approach to advertising.

The final two pillars aim to ensure affiliates do not deceive punters, and lastly that affiliate advertising aligns with addiction prevention efforts.

This code works according to a ‘per website’ principle: the quality mark is assigned to the offered website of an affiliate. A total of 17 affiliate sites have signed up to become members of the KVA program.

“Affiliate marketing is regularly used within the online casino industry. This is also the case on the Dutch regulated market,” the KVA code states.

“A bottleneck in this is that it is (often) not possible for providers to have control over the expressions of these ‘online casino affiliates’.

“And while it is precisely the intention that the affiliate can post ‘independent, objective’ content, it is absolutely not the intention that the affiliate carries out advertising and recruitment activities for a provider that are in violation of laws and regulations.

“Creating trust as an affiliate (to the consumer, provider, and regulator), in a verifiable manner, is an obvious solution,” the KVA website adds.

EGR has learned bet365 does not charge affiliates for the service, with bet365’s compliance department instead conducting its own checks, in line with the KVA code.bb

Shedding some light on how this impacts affiliates, one Dutch affiliate for bet365 told EGR: “Before we were accepted as affiliate for the bet365 partner program they checked our site to see if we were compliant.

“They checked our website, and we had to send them analytics to prove that 70% of our target market is older than 24.

“In the end bet365 asked us to fine tune the RG message in order to be compliant, so it was clear to us that they really went through the site in detail,” the affiliate added.

In contrast, Tombola, which was recently bought by Flutter Entertainment has indicated that adherence to the code is a mandatory requirement for all Dutch affiliates.

Secondly, Tombola has said the costs of ensuring affiliate sites comply with the KVA code must be paid by affiliates rather than by the operator itself.

The legal firm involved, XY Legal charges €1,125 per website for the KVA mark, falling to €725 per year for every subsequent year the site operates in the Dutch market.

For affiliate companies with a large number of websites this potentially opens up extra cost of several tens of thousands of euros due to the firm’s ‘one site one check’ policy.

Shedding light on the process used XY Legal managing partner Steven Vrolijk, LL.M suggested such a check would ultimately benefit the affiliate in the longer term.

“Our legal team will take about 10 – 15 hours to go through important parts of the website and will check if the site complies with the Dutch Legislation and the KVA code,” Vrolijk told EGR.

“During this initial compliance check, an extensive report will be set up for the affiliate, explaining both positive and negative findings.

“Almost never is the site directly compliant and then we will ask the affiliate to fix our feedback. When this has been done, we will conduct another compliance check and again set up a report. In some cases, it has taken as much as three rounds and over 24 hours to get it right,” Vrolijk added.

The new measures come amid the background of increased compliance standards being used by the KSA in combatting illegal gambling.

Indeed, the KSA has confirmed that enforcement action is to be taken against 15 affiliate sites for advertising illegal games of chance, following 22 investigations.

In 13 of these cases, a financial penalty will be imposed, while two others are currently under investigation. Most of the affected affiliates transferred to advertising licensed operators only once the advertising violations were highlighted by the KSA.