New UK gambling rules on direct marketing and cross-selling will ensure any changes to the consumer experience will happen smoothly, the Gambling Commission has said.
The UK regulator’s executive director of research and policy, Tim Miller said one method of implementing new regulations on giving choice to consumers on the marketing they receive would have meant that all consumers would “automatically” have lost all marketing “before they had an opportunity to express their preferences.”
The regulations, which are set to come into force on January 17 next year, have instead been reworked, Miller said.
He said in a media briefing attended by InterGame after Wednesday’s wide-ranging consultation response feedback that the rules will mean consumers “can carry on as they are until the next time they log in to their account.”
This is when they “will be presented with the option of choosing what type of marketing they want,” Miller said.
While regulations on cross-selling and marketing will come into force at the same time as bans for certain elements of igaming products, the implementation of the first tranche of policy proposals varies.
Proposed light-touch financial vulnerability checks will come into force in two stages, the first on August 30 mandating checks on customers whose net deposit is more than £500, before the threshold is reduced to over £150 from the end of February.
New rules enforcing age verification test purcashing for land-based licensees will also come into force at the end of August, but new provisions on personal management licences and the extension of roles will be enacted from November 30.
Miller said: “The Department for Culture, Media and Sport is progressing different elements of the white paper and there will be different deadlines there.
“What we’re trying to do is spread out the implementation work for industry, so they’re not trying to implement everything at the same time.
“That has a further additional benefit for us, which is if we tried to implement everything in one go, it becomes really difficult to then properly evaluate the impacts that those individual changes had.
“By staggering the implementation, we can do more effective evaluation and understand what works and what hasn’t worked.”
