As the online gambling sector continues to grow, so too do the risks posed by addiction and problematic gambling behaviour faced by vulnerable customers. The effects of uncontrolled and unhealthy gambling can be devastating, and a recent rise in the numbers affected has led to moves in the industry to regulate operators and protect customers.
While operators are already required by law to monitor gambling accounts with the aim of identifying harm, the UK Gambling Commission (GC) has since published a new consultation (link to external site) in April 2023 specifically regarding remote customer interaction, which explicitly states that operators must now proactively avoid causing their client financial harm and take action when they become aware of gambler vulnerability.
Operators who fail to sufficiently monitor and protect customers from the risks caused by gambling may face financial penalties or even prosecution (link to external site).
What is Probability of Harm (ProbH)?
To directly address the shifts in regulatory trends in the online gambling sector and provide merchants with the tools they need to protect their customers, we have now launched our Probability of Harm (ProbH) product. Trust Payments provides gateway and acquiring services for over 100 merchants in the industry and we are able to use various statistical techniques, including machine learning to leverage transaction history of customers across these businesses to identify red flags that may indicate problematic gambling behaviour.
Following our checks, we output a score between 0 and 100%:
- A value near 0% suggests a very low risk to the customer.
- A value near 100% suggests a very high risk to the customer.
You can use this harm score as a tool to help make more informed decisions when it comes to safeguarding your customers from harmful gambling behaviour.
Our aim is to provide you with the tools to keep your customers safe while ensuring we don't unfairly target and disrupt safe gambling. When calculating the harm score, we have carefully tuned our algorithms to account for a range of different factors considered potentially indicative of financial distress, meaning you don't need to worry about ProbH highlighting transactions as harmful solely because customers are active on your service or placing large bets.
How ProbH fits into your solution
Remember that despite providing you with an explicit harm score, in reality, risk of harm from gambling isn't something that is objectively measurable. Because of this, you should not solely rely on ProbH when it comes to looking after your customers.
While we hope ProbH will be an invaluable tool for your business, ProbH cannot guarantee to highlight all customers at risk. For this reason, we recommend that you perform additional checks using other tools and use ProbH to help paint a better picture of a customer's situation and make a more informed judgement.
Using ProbH
We provide two ways to access ProbH data:
- API integration - Submit PROBH requests through our Webservices API to receive harm scores in real-time as part of your transaction flow. This allows you to integrate harm checks directly into your customer journey and make immediate decisions based on the scores returned.
- ProbH web app - Sign in to our secure web app to view scores assigned to specific payment cards or access information on risk distribution across your entire customer base.
Both methods utilise the same underlying harm scores, allowing you to choose the approach that best fits your operational needs.
Requirements
- The Merchant Category Code (MCC) assigned to your account must be 7995. This is the industry category for betting (including lottery tickets, casino gaming chips, off-track betting and wagers).
- You must have been processing transactions for at least 3 weeks to provide us with sufficient data to understand typical customer gambling behaviour on your website.
- You must use a Trust Payments acquiring account.
- Performing ProbH checks requires your platform to be configured to send requests to our TRU Connect gateway using our Webservices API and interpret the responses returned.
- To enquire about enabling ProbH as part of your integration with Trust Payments, please get in touch.
