We strive to maintain long term relationships with our players, which we know must be built on ensuring customers gamble in a safe and sustainable way.
As part of the ‘Players’ pillar of our ESG framework, our focus is on promoting positive play, particularly through educating customers and providing a range of intuitive and accessible safer gambling tools.
Across the business work continues on our holistic approach to player safety across all of our brands, platforms and geographies, subject of course to ensuring compliance with specific local requirements where relevant.
Our efforts are focused around three principles:
Prevent
Instil safer gambling principles across the player base and with colleagues to help prevent gambling related harm before it occurs.
Education and awareness: Ensure players know the risks of gambling and normalise discussions about safer gambling. We also strive to ensure colleagues are informed about the potential risks a small proportion of our players can face from using our products, so they are better positioned to identify vulnerable players and prevent the risk of harm.
Safer gambling tools: Drive mass adoption of safer gambling tools that help players control spend and provide alerts regarding their betting behaviour.
Across our products, the use of deposit limits continues to rise. We want to encourage positive play in our customers and we believe deposit limits are a key tool to help. We will continue to educate customers about the use of deposit limits.
William Hill continued to improve its profit and loss tool by making it more intuitive, with simple and clear visuals of a player's activity as well as being more prominent across its products. On our 888 platform, over 70% of customers now have access to our proprietary Control Centre product, which contains our enhanced safer gambling toolset including a proprietary profit and loss tool.
In the UK we gave over £10m to charities voluntarily, as part of the final year of our four-year commitment to fund Research Education and Treatment of gambling harms.
Identify
Use best in-class proprietary and third party technology to identify risky players quickly.
Monitoring of markers of harm: Timely analysis of player behaviour to highlight potential risk factors.
Personalised risk profiling: We want to ensure players get an individualised gambling experience that relates to them directly.
Our trained retail colleagues can interact face to face with any customers who might exhibiting signs of harmful gambling and can do so in a discreet and effective manner.
With the number of brands in our portfolio we now have a complex ecosystem across multiple different platforms. Work continues to align our platforms, with a critical focus on ensuring safer gambling is a priority.
In the UK, our approach continues to evolve as we prepare for the implementation of initiatives covered as part of the UK government’s White Paper recommendations. We have also continued to proactively develop our models, processes, and tools to better identify and interact with customers and ensure we provide them with a safe gambling environment. We aim to personalise the overarching safer gambling customer journey for our players, in which they are scored and segmented by risk level to ensure our monitoring and intervention is appropriately tailored to them.
Act
Interact with players at different risk levels at the right time using the right contact method.
Human: We carry out thousands of one-to-one interactions with our players on a daily basis. We want our colleagues to have the best training available to ensure they are in the best position to deliver meaningful and impactful interactions.
Automated: We are a business of scale that has millions of players around the world. In order to effectively communicate with such a large player base, we must have a scalable technology solution to be able to interact with our players at multiple points in their gambling journey.
We continued to expand our safer gambling interactions with customers online across all our brands. In 2023 we sent over 1.3 million messages to players based on individual customer behaviours, and we will continue to evolve our interaction strategy to offer interactions bespoke to individual customer behaviours.
In retail over 127,000 interactions took place with customers in the year, including discussions of affordability of spend.
