Hawkswood, who is leaving the RGA in 2019 after a 13-year tenure, confirmed: “ICE London is the event on the industry calendar where you have the opportunity to encounter that one person or that one group who comes up with something that makes you go, ‘Wow – I wish I’d thought of that’. In the past, it would have been something like betting exchanges. Or it might have been the first person to say, ‘I’ll tell you what, I think online poker’s a good idea’.”
“It’s really difficult, because even with the size of the industry, the amount of money that’s spent on R&D and the number of really talented, clever people there are in it, it’s incredibly hard coming up with that one thing. But anybody who is a genuine innovator, who comes up with something new – I think that’s where the genius is. You have to be a genius to come up with that special thing,” he continued.
Of the wealth of new ideas and technologies coming into focus, artificial intelligence and big data have recently come to the forefront of the remote sector’s social responsibility efforts. Over the past few years, the RGA has hosted a series of quarterly workshops featuring businesses, researchers and regulators looking at how a greater understanding of player behaviour can be weaponised in the fight against problem gambling.
“Clearly, we don’t see customers face-to-face, but what we do have is all that data about them,” said Hawkswood. “By using that data, we can certainly, in most cases, identify changes in behaviour that would indicate problematic play and then use that to interact with the customers and try and get them back down to whatever their normal level is. Longer term, that is going to be huge for the industry. I think our long-term success fully depends on us getting that right.”
“If we don’t protect consumers, keep crime out, all those sorts of things, then the industry’s not sustainable,” said Hawkswood. “And we’re trying to show regulators and governments that, actually, this is in our interest to get this right. I think people want to know that firms are protecting their customers. The commercial value of that is if you have a lifelong customer, that’s a sustainable business. The boom and bust of problem gamblers – you lose them, they just move onto another company – is not good business.”
Source: GMB
