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) published a consultation (link to external site) in 2023 targeting remote customer interaction that stated explicitly 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, Trust Payments offers an innovative product called Probability of Harm (ProbH). Leveraging our many years of expertise in providing gateway and acquiring services to over 100 merchants in the industry, we employ statistical analysis and machine learning techniques to review historical data and trends to identify harmful gambling behaviours among your customers.
Following our checks on any given customer, we generate a score between 0 and 100%:
- A value near 0% suggests a very low risk to the customer being checked.
- A value near 100% suggests a very high risk to the customer being checked.
By generating these harm scores and aggregating the results, ProbH acts as a tool to help make more informed decisions when it comes to safeguarding your customers from the risks of gambling.
If you'd like to learn more about how harm scores are calculated, please contact our Support Team and request access to the full documentation.
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 risk of harm from gambling isn't something that is objectively measurable. Because of this, you should not solely rely on ProbH harm scores when it comes to looking after your customers.
While we hope ProbH will be an invaluable tool for your business, ProbH cannot guarantee to identify all harmful trends in customer behaviour. For this reason, we recommend that you consider ProbH as a single indicator among a number of other checks performed on your platform to help make more informed decisions regarding customer safety.
Using ProbH
We provide two ways to access ProbH data:
- Portal — Operators with MCC 7995 are automatically granted access to a dedicated Portal page displaying risk distribution across your entire customer base. Through intuitive visual reporting, you can identify broader trends and gain a clearer picture of harm exposure across your business. Learn more about ProbH in Portal.
- API Integration — Submit PROBH requests through our Webservices API to receive harm scores in real-time as part of your transaction flow, allowing you to integrate harm checks directly into your customer journey and make immediate decisions for individual customers. Learn more about ProbH via API.
Both methods operate using 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.
- If you'd like to utilise our API to perform checks on individual customers as part of the payment flow, this requires a software developer to follow our technical documentation and build out the mechanisms to generate the necessary requests and interpret the responses returned. This approach requires utilisation of our Webservices API platform.
- To enquire about enabling ProbH as part of your integration with Trust Payments, please contact us.
