Silver linings: How Sky Bet is using past experiences to redefine safer gambling

Looking at the UK sports betting industry as an outside observer, there are broadly two types of operators. On the one hand, there are the long-established brands such as Ladbrokes, William Hill and, to a lesser extent, Paddy Power which have been present in the UK market in a retail capacity for decades. Firms like this have become part of UK society, and to some degree have cornered the market in how gambling is conducted and how it has evolved in the UK.

On the other hand, you have the new blood, operators such as bet365 and Sky Betting & Gaming (SBG), whose presence in the UK market predominantly specialises in the more recent part of the sports betting market, namely the online sector, to create a more than significant market share. In the case of SBG, former CEO, and now executive chairman, Richard Flint has been just as powerful in his efforts to turn SBG into an operator which can sustain its place in the gambling hegemony, while at the same time lobbying for a culture of openness and public accountability in the wider industry.

So, when SBG was itself hit with a £1m penalty package from the Gambling Commission (UKGC) in March 2018 for “serious failings” in protecting vulnerable customers in several areas including self-exclusion, marketing and account management, the whole industry took notice. For SBG’s head of safer gambling Ben Wright, the fine was “a difficult thing for us to encounter as an operator”.

“As an operator you don’t ever want to get in a position like this where you’ve potentially let your customers down and failed to protect them,” he adds. Indeed, for Wright, this incident, which was uncovered by the operator proactively following internal review and notified to the UKGC, served as a reminder that SBG isn’t infallible in its practices, with the company working hard to improve its technology and processes to develop a “rigorous framework” to make sure its customers are protected.

“In terms of the positives to take from the situation; we voluntarily informed the UKGC of the issue and used a multi-disciplined internal team to resolve the issue in a fair way for our customers. The proactive nature of our report and the honesty shown was reflected in the positive comments from the Commission in the settlement statement. Following on from this, we have invested a lot not just in my team but in areas like compliance, audit and risk assurance to make sure this doesn’t happen again. I think this has been part of a lot of the cultural change that has occurred in SBG. We’ve talked about this before in how we want to run our business effectively and some of this stems from this incident,” Wright adds.

Culture shift

The sea change in corporate culture is personified in Wright’s role as Sky Betting & Gaming’s first head of safer gambling, a role which he was appointed to in January 2019 after more than 10 years at the sports betting firm in a variety of roles across the trading and commercial arms of the business.

As someone who has been with the firm for a significant period of time, Wright has witnessed many corporate changes. Looking specifically at his safer gambling role before it became part of his colleagues’ wider remit, the risk and safer gambling teams are now two distinct parts of the business which retain a strong relationship. However, as Wright explains: “Under this arrangement, there’s more focus on the individual parts than we had before with just one person running it. We have invested a lot in terms of our teams so we have people in dedicated safer gambling roles who are focused on this full-time.”

At a wider level, an element of the SBG company-wide bonus scheme in 2018 was related to the safer gambling performance of the whole business, and not just for the individuals involved in these teams. Aside from the financial incentives, this serves to emphasise to company employees how seriously SBG is taking safer gambling, enshrining its place in its corporate culture.

Another example of this switch on to corporate social responsibility (CSR) which Wright highlights is the launch of Scrabit in conjunction with YGAM, an app which deals with another aspect of safer gambling covering online addiction. The delivery of this app was achieved by SBG technologists giving up their learning and development (L&D) free project development time on a Friday afternoon to work on this application.

Reflecting on his tenure at the helm of the safer gambling team, Wright believes the biggest asset is how “bought in” SBG employees are to the concept of responsible/safer gambling, whether it be in the company’s Bet tribe, its research teams or elsewhere throughout the company. “People are keen and want to know what’s going on and how they can help. We can harness that in a powerful way and it helps me to get things done,” he explains.

Tools of the trade

Independent of the cultural shift which has occurred at the heart of SBG’s corporate ethos, the Leeds-based firm’s attitude to responsible gambling is characterised by Wright as going beyond the minimum regulatory standards of responsible gambling. He explains SBG simply has a “great desire to do the right thing” and put its customers at the heart of everything it does, be it via the products and services it builds or at a higher level with its company-wide approach to the industry.

Elaborating on what that means for safer gambling, Wright asserts a company-held belief that its products should be used in “a safe and stable manner” and that the challenge for SBG is normalising how people do that. As he explains, safer gambling must move from being an “intangible thing that a lot of customers think is not for them” towards a more switched-on approach, where players manage their gambling sustainably.

To achieve this, SBG has refined its approach to safer gambling, overhauling its pre-existing deposit limits and cooling-off period functions and developing a third profit and loss function, which allows customers to monitor their spending.

Wright highlights this latter function as being a key example of how the business is using current regulatory requirements to go beyond, giving its customers the “perfect view” of their gambling performance on their Sky Bet product. He believes players on balance prefer “the tools to manage their own spend and not have how they use their products imposed on them”.

And the figures certainly seem to bear this out, with over 50% of customers gambling via Sky Bet during the last quarter of 2018 accessing the profit and loss tool. Indeed, Wright welcomes the “very positive part” these sorts of tools are playing in the normalisation of safer gambling.

In tandem with this, the business launched the multi-million-pound ‘Three Simple Tools’ advertising campaign, using Sky Sports pundits Matt Le Tissier, Charlie Nicholas and Phil Thompson each representing one of the tools on offer to players. This campaign, Wright believes, has done “powerful things” in changing the way people use Sky Bet products, contributing to a 27% uplift in the usage of safer gambling tools during the last quarter alone.

Education, education, education

Another well-publicised element of SBG’s approach is its sponsorship of the English Football League (EFL), which Wright claims is “one of our biggest shop windows in terms of visibility”. A key constituent of this deal was to encompass a responsible gambling-led agenda, culminating in a memorandum of association being signed between the operator and the leagues.

As part of the deal, funding is passed to the 72 EFL clubs, which all now include responsible gambling messages on the sleeves of every home and away kit. But moving beyond the sponsorship and funding elements, a key part of this partnership has been in educating players on the dangers of gambling.

In partnership with EPIC risk management, SBG has committed to visiting and providing education to players in all 72 league clubs every year for five years. “We’ve just about finished year one of this project and the feedback from that has been overwhelmingly positive and we’re looking at how we can take that forward in year two onwards,” Wright adds.

As he explains, SBG is looking to extend this in year two, not just to first team squads and staff, but also to academies as well, by using former players to deliver crucial education about gambling at the start of many young players careers.

One enhancement SBG research has found to be successful in its Sky Vegas brand is its notification software known as the Bell. Due to be rolled out across the SBG catalogue in the near future, the Bell typifies SBG’s attempts to use technology in its approach to safer gambling, evolving its existing nudge strategy into a layered-based system of consumer interaction and behavioural monitoring.

According to Wright, SBG is looking to define its long-term safer gambling strategy in several areas through a combination of investment in new technologies and enhancements of existing brands, to try to become “more sophisticated in the methodology with which we’re reaching our customers”.

SBG’s investment in consumer research, particularly using methodology pioneered by Canadian company GamRes, has yielded some interesting results, especially in gambling literacy where researchers identified a definite gap in players gambling knowledge. Addressing this gap in a wider fashion is something that Wright highlights as a big area of improvement for SBG over the coming year.

Another key focus is getting more out of the one thing that SBG has an abundance of, namely data, which he believes is essential for identifying not only problem gamblers but those at risk of becoming problem gamblers.

For Wright, data is the big plus point the online industry has over its offline counterparts. “We need to better leverage that [data] and make sure we continue to invest in highlighting customers whose behaviours change,” Wright adds.

It’s good to talk

Despite these positive efforts to change the narrative on responsible gambling, Wright is keen to stress that SBG is not a perfect operator and that it is continuously trying to improve through, among other things, additional investment. As he explains, plenty of other operators are doing similar things in RG and not receiving credit for their efforts. The key for Wright is working together more, sharing what works and collaborating to make meaningful policies.

Qualifying this assertion, Wright reiterates his belief that there has been “a lot of talk of collaboration so far with probably too little output”. However, he highlights 2019 as being a year where there will likely be greater input into this from industry groups such as the Remote Gambling Association (RGA) and Senet Group, both of which count many of the UK’s biggest operators as members.

However, as Wright explains, regulators should be careful not to apply “heavy-handed” regulations born in the offline world to the online gambling space as the data available about players differs heavily. “We need to be looking to be not overly onerous with our regulation but driving forward with developments to keep people safe at the same time,” he adds.

As a member of the RGA, SBG has been particularly active in one of the association’s main working groups, that of gambling affordability, which mirrors its own efforts in developing the profit and loss tool. The RGA’s recommendations in this area are set to be unveiled later this year.

Moving forward

The UKGC signalled a change in perspective recently when it announced the change in name of the Responsible Gambling Strategy Board (RGSB) to the Advisory Board for Safer Gambling (ABSG) to reflect what it calls a “sharper focus” on safer gambling.

It’s a change Wright believes is mirrored by SBG as it looks to “evolve the responsible gambling conversation” further towards safer gambling. Wright believes responsible gambling is part of safer gambling, but RG is “putting too much onus on the customer, operators play an important role in this and we shouldn’t forget that”.

An essential part of the safer gambling agenda for Wright is normalising the use of safer gambling led tools and messaging by operators. As he explains, SBG’s research has shown its customers believe the company is doing the right thing by building tools such as this and much of SBG’s development in this area is governed by consumer interaction.

However, one of the challenging aspects in normalising safer gambling is that players do not think the tools are for them. “We need to change this attitude among our target audience and enable everyone to understand why they need to use them and why they exist,” Wright adds.

Learning lessons from failures can be a hard thing but, if SBG is any indication, gambling operators can learn from their mistakes to create a safer, more prosperous gambling market for players.