iGaming Daily

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The latest episode of our Path to Lisbon series takes us across the pond to our recent SBC Summit North America event held earlier this year with a focus on the Player Protection Symposium. This episode will see us revisit scaled down version of the panel session. Those responsible gambling truly create both sustainability and long term growth for operators. Where the conversation focused on the expanding North American market, deliberate on the method and reasons behind actively involving key commercial stakeholders in promoting a successful gambling strategy. The panel session will feature voices from BetMGM, DraftKings, Fangil and Epic Global Solutions. Player protection will also be a key focal point at this year's SBC Summit Lisbon, as I'll be a player protection symposium track. across a whole three days of the conference. Focus on key topics such as identification technology, real life insights, the UK white paper, social media, and much more. For more information, check out the SPC Summit Lisbon website. Links will be left in the description below. The title of the panel today is, does responsible gambling truly create sustainability and long-term growth? I'm not gonna ask that directly because I think I know what the answer will be from each of you. So instead I want to spend some time. talking a little bit about what you're doing within your organizations on the RG front, what's the latest, what's the journey, where have you come from? Now, the panel is a bit of a case study today because Theresa and I are colleagues and we have three of our clients here, three out of the seven ROGA partners with us. As you've heard with an incredibly diverse, a well-complimented background. So, Theresa, if I can come to you first and you could do a bit of a background to what are we working on with these through clients, how do Epic help in that sense? And then we'll go down the line and see what's happening. Sure, happy to. So very fortunate to work with these three folks to my left. Essentially, we work with them in all different ways. So for us, it's really, really important to influence the structures and processes which either lend themselves or mitigate harm as it relates to our consumers. So without. Without. calling out who I'm doing what with, it's very important to do an organizational assessment. So looking at the actual operations and understanding where there are opportunities as it relates to responsible gaming. Many of us in the room know Epic Global Solutions for the education and training that we provide. So half of our staff have lived experience of gambling addiction that is central to every single thing that we do. So whether it's reviewing policies for operators, whether it's delivering customized training to VIP account managers, we do a bit of everything with the social mission that we are truly trying to influence change and mitigate harm in what we hope will be a very sustainable industry. Thank you. Let me start with Fandil then. Let's go down to the end with Ashley. And can you talk to us a little bit about what's going on at Fandil right now? Absolutely. So I'd say at Fandil, I mean, we continue to, you know, work to kind of elevate and evolve our responsible gaming program. And our approach to responsible gaming really centers around meeting players where they are. So on the prevention front, that's investing in, you know, awareness and education efforts for, you know, the vast majority of players who are able to play responsibly. And on that front, we've been busy so far this year. Earlier this year, we partnered with Front Office Sports to launch a free online course, Introduction to Responsible Gaming, for sports industry professionals. We also announced earlier this year a new partnership with an organization called Operation Hope. It's a nation's largest nonprofit focused on economic empowerment and promoting access to financial literacy resources. And we're continuing to build out our Responsible Gaming Ambassador program as well. So you'll see more to come on that soon, but this is the program that we launched in 2021. with Craig Carton, a sports media personality who has lived experience with problem gambling and he really shares his experience in a really compelling and authentic way. And last year we announced that we were adding international soccer icon, Carly Lloyd, and PGA rising star, Tom Kim to the program. And I've been starting to try to do some new things, going beyond kind of PSA style messages to raise awareness of problem gambling. And recently, we actually launched a sweepstakes with Tom Kim, where the method of entry was actually applying a responsible gaming tool for a chance to win some custom golf club sets. We're putting out a campaign in a couple of weeks with him that pairs RG tips with golf tips from Tom, looking at some more kind of incentivization opportunities with some of these ambassadors over the coming months. So. Say there's a lot of piloting going on to really try new things in the space with backed by learning plans to really see what resonates before we kind of scale things further. So exciting year ahead. So much happening talking of people that need golf tips, which you would come in on that. He's just jealous because tomorrow I'll be playing Shadow Creek and he will not be playing Shadow Creek. So, you know, I've been at Bet MGM now since September of 2020. which is like probably 20 years in RG years. So, you know, back then it was about getting to new markets, building a compliance driven approach and making sure that as an operator, we were doing everything that we're required to do from a regulatory perspective. But we did more than that. And over the years, we've evolved our program to really do it, as Ashley said, meet the players where they're at. And so from establishing a refined regulatory approach to moving into the implementation of Game Sense, which Dresa mentioned, which is a renowned responsible gaming program really designed to empower and educate players to gamble responsibly, to really just embedding a culture of responsible gambling throughout the organization. And that starts with leadership. Our chairman, or sorry, our CEO, Adam Greenblatt, is the chair of our Responsible Gambling Leadership Council. And we meet on a quarterly basis to discuss key responsible gambling initiatives and strategies to make sure that as a company, we're all on the same page and in alignment. And that really allows my team to do the work that we need to do to provide the best experience for our customers possible. Because I don't think you can have a best experience without responsible gambling as part of that experience. And recently we've started to... do more awareness. Connor McDavid, NHL superstar and one of our Bet MGM ambassadors did a responsible gambling commercial talking about the importance of using responsible gambling tools to help you get the best experience possible. We signed a partnership with Kind Bridge that we're very proud of last fall to help deliver care and services to those who self-exclude on our platform, a very important aspect of the continuum. And we continue to work together internally within to look for new ways of evolving our program to help our customers understand the tools, understand why they benefit them, and hopefully get them to use them and check in on them and make sure that they're doing okay. Beyond that, collaboration externally as well. I know we're gonna talk about ROGA here in a bit, and it's been mentioned previously, but as Chrissy mentioned, this is the one area, I think, within our industry where we all agree we're on the same team, and we're very transparent about sharing things that can help us because in this part of the industry, we need to work together to make sure we're all doing what we can to ensure a responsible and sustainable industry. I think that collaboration is probably actually the theme of the panel. We'll hear more as we go on that there's more happening than probably the public think. Chrissy, let's throw it over to you. Yeah, and just to pick up on Rich's point, you know, there is this... emphasis now on really paying attention to the customer where they're at and there's an emphasis on going above and beyond What is just regulatory required and I think you know Just hearing Ashley and rich talk you can get a sense that we are all doing that We are all kind of at the point now. We're five years post-paspo We are into a space in place where we are all thinking about how can we go above and beyond? How can we be more innovative? How can we be more? in tune with our customers and our player base, and how can we engage them in a way that we continue to de-stigmatize responsible gaming and really normalize people engaging with some of the tools and resources that we have. So for example, we all have limit setting, cool-offs, and self-exclusions, but what else can we do, and where else can we meet our players where they're at? One of the things that I'm extremely proud of at DraftKings that we launched this year, actually last month during P-GAM, is my stat sheet. And it is a visual on the phone where people can get all the data of where they bet, how much they bet, what they lost, net win and loss, what they bet on, what... platforms they use the most, how much they spent, et cetera. And it really is just a quick snapshot. It's a visual, and it's going to get enhanced over time. But it allows the player to kind of take a beat, take a moment, realize what they've done, how well they've done or not well, and really get a snapshot of where they are within their play journey to understand what they're doing. Like that NGM and my other colleagues at Vandal here. We also engage with Kynbridge Behavioral Health and are now offering all our self-excluded players access to KBH's health services. So anyone who self-excludes off our site gets an automatic link to resources to catch them in the moment of potentially wanting to be active and engage with help and resources. So really tremendous growth in the individual operator space getting the word out, but also kind of collectively. One of the biggest achievements I think has been introducing the lived experience through Epic to our players. We developed a relationship early on when I first started at DraftKings and... We now use the lived experience as a cornerstone of our education platform. Our employees have access to it. We film it, we keep it on our Safer Play portal so our individual employees can access it at any time. If something resonated with them, they can go back and look at it. They always have access to the RG team to ask questions. So it's not just. the innovation what we're doing with our external stakeholders, but also really bringing our employees along the journey with us so that they understand throughout a player's journey where responsible gaming makes sense, but also throughout their journey as an employee how what they do every day has an impact on responsible gaming. So, Theresa, a whole spectrum of things going on in the innovation space here. I think one thing that brings these three businesses together and, of course, brings the whole industry together on RG is Problem Gambling Awareness Month. Do you want to go into a little bit about what we do to support probably our busiest month, you know, working in North America? Chrissie mentioned the lived experience seminars. Do you want to expand on that bit? Sure. It is absolutely our busiest month in North America, but I mean that in the best way possible. So it gives us the opportunity to have uninterrupted face time with operators, with staff from every different department and allow somebody with lived experience of gambling addiction to share their story. And so the thinking is that we can empower our audience and our listeners. with information, so when they go back, once our presentation is done, they will have that to refer back to, and they can start integrating it throughout their daily operations. The whole idea here is to integrate prevention, and that's really, really hard to measure. So we also believe that lived experience is a cornerstone of how to start this work. In addition to... the lived experience presentations that we do, either virtually or in person, we also collect data. So how successful is the session? Do we need to change our content and continue working? None of this stuff is going to change overnight. It has to be a commitment from the operators, from everyone who is involved with the training, but the numbers speak for themselves. We believe we're heading in the right direction. So I give credit to. everyone on the operator side working within the RG space because I think at times it can definitely feel like you are rowing in the opposite direction of the entire organization. Let's throw this open to anybody who wants to jump in about. the impact that's had. I mean, we talk about sustainability and long-term growth here. For that, we need to get beyond our GE departments. We need to get around the entire organization. And that's really what we do during P-GAM, is it's open sessions for people to join. Anyone wanna come in on what you're hoping to achieve by doing that? Happy to. I think in general, we are fortunate that we have a pretty engaged colleague base at Fandl. It's a pretty engaged culture. But when it comes to RG, we do try to take kind of an inside-out approach, feeling that, you know, our own employees need to understand the importance of RG, how it fits into their role in order for them to actually act as RG ambassadors externally as well. And when we started partnering with Epic last September to offer a series of lived experience sessions to colleagues, I expected them to be decently well attended, but I was pretty taken aback at the response that we got, not only in terms of the attendance, but the number of times I'm on a. totally unrelated call with someone and they bring up a detail from Ryan's story or Jordan's story that resonated with them or made them really emotional or that they thought about in a future interaction. So I think that's been huge. And we've not only integrated the lived experience sessions into our internal culture building, but beyond that, we do things like an annual Play Well Day, where we take everyone away from their day to day to focus on the role they play in advancing our RG commitments. We've started a peer-to-peer recognition program, where colleagues will. nominate and recognize their teammates for outstanding RG work, and we actually reward them with gift cards and swag. Just continuing to really raise visibility on why this is so important, and try to make it tangible for people who maybe don't see some of the examples of the RG work in their day-to-day, to really make them feel connected to it. I think it's important to add that human side to it, isn't it? Sometimes we can get caught up in numbers and statistics and which direction things are flowing. Anyone else want to add to that? Yeah, I'll say this. When we did our sessions the first time, I think it was 2021 when we went into those waters. Gary Deutsch, my chief financial officer, sent me a message during one of the facilitator sessions. and he said, this is the most important training we offer at BetMGM. And that's the chief financial officer. So if there's any idea that we are in opposition of revenue generation and that kind of thing, that put it to rest for me and really showed me that leadership is truly committed to this. I think the importance of what you all do and why we continue to work with you is there's a lot we can learn from the experiences of others. whether it's the individuals themselves or the industry in general and other jurisdictions, it's important for us to take pause and seek out lessons from the past so that we can avoid a lot of the same pitfalls that others may have gone through and also be able to help people when they need help the most. And so it provides our employees that extra layer of, did I check on them about this? Because I know from these sessions. when these types of activities, maybe it's playing later at night or playing at higher stakes than what they usually play for, could be an indication. So maybe I should go and have a conversation with this player, or maybe I should have the RG team take a look at the player and get their input. And we see a lot of that occur after these trainings. And there's a great dialogue between my team and the customer service, VIP, and our risk teams as we go through players and making sure that they're doing this in a way that's appropriate for them. I love that. I think that one of the things that makes me most happy about P-GAM is not that our GEM has jumped on the month long bandwagon and we have two months now that we focus on this. But what has made me so happy is that employees now are coming to us saying, oh, we know that March is P-GAM. What are we gonna do? Everybody from our social team, our product teams, our analytics teams, they're reaching out saying, oh, did we get the new banner for P-GAM yet? How are we gonna put this up? How are we gonna engage with it? And I think what it does is, what it has allowed us to do P-GAM, having these months that are focused, although we do focus all year round, but having these focused months really allows the employee base to embrace what we're doing in a fashion that may not be relevant to them on a day-to-day basis through the. course of the year. And so having the teams reach out to us, engage with us, we similarly do incentivized programs with Epic, and we make sure that everybody has this experience where they are in someone else's shoes for an hour, where they may not even realize that gambling can become a problem for somebody. They may not realize the devastating ripple effects it has on families, and they may not realize kind of that it can be a thing. And so what it allows us to do is just allow our employees a safe space to listen, to engage, to become a little bit more empathetic to what might happen to someone who has the problem. And to me, that is the most rewarding thing. Watching this grow over time has just been tremendously rewarding. And I think for us, you know, having Epic. in to provide those lived experience and often they're former athletes. And so that has been something that really resonates with our employee base as well. If I could just add to that, I think PGAAM Responsible Gaming Education Month is a fantastic opportunity to educate. regulators in the public within the space as well. And I think we'd be remiss if none of us acknowledged the work of those operating in the treatment space, problem gambling councils, anyone in the clinical space. It has to be collaborative, it has to be holistic. So while Epic does awesome work within prevention, there's much more to it. So I. I love what I've been seeing over the past few years, using it as an opportunity to highlight the work and further engaging with regulators so they can really shape what the future looks like. Do you think it's helpful to have months like P-GAM and RGM? I mean, we've got two of them now. Do we just need to add 10 more months and just do it all year round? Does it help you internally? Not 10 more acronyms, though, please. Hey, Dan. Every day is responsible GAM on Education Day up at MGM and the other operators here. But what's the effect internally? I think you were kind of hinting at it there, Chrissy, that it gives you kind of more importance within the organization within that month. Does it help you to get your voices elevated within the business? Yeah, that's a great question. It does help us get our voices elevated and it helps bring attention to our Responsible Gaming program. It opens the dialogue. It allows people to... have a heightened focus, not that as Rich just said, every day we focus on responsible gaming, but it allows employees to have a heightened focus that this is something that is really important, this is something that comes from the top down that we need to pay attention to, regardless of where you sit within the infrastructure of the organization. It is something that allows people to... really engage in a way that they may not have and ask questions and reach out to us. And for us at DraftKings, you know, it really is very much, we are obviously a customer-centric organization and we wanna make sure that every player, not just VIP players or not just people who are struggling, responsible gaming program and problem gambling specifically during P-GAM needs to be discussed. It needs to be. brought to attention. It's not something that we don't talk about anymore. It's something that is part of the fabric of what we do. It's how we engage. It's a component of our responsible gaming program. And this year, I love the theme. It was every story matters. And I think that really resonated with our team. And so we highlight, just like all of my colleagues do, employees that really focus on this, ambassadors throughout the organization. And... Their story matters. We kind of switched it a little bit. Every story matters internally. Every part of our infrastructure, every stakeholder base, regardless if you are the farthest away from it, maybe in finance or something, or in an area that isn't omnipresent every day, every story matters. How it... touches you as an individual working for an operator, how it might touch someone in your family or a friend. It's really important. And so P-GAM specifically and RGEM as well are real opportunities for us just to highlight and enhance what we're doing in a bolder light, if you will. So let's turn this back to the title of the panel then. If we want to create sustainability, we need commerciality attached to this. You know, that's what... runs things around here. How does that work then? Let me play the idiot here for a second. How can responsible gambling possibly make you any more money? Surely it just affects the bottom line. Yeah, it keeps your license. We hear these things, right? No, not at all. Listen, responsible gambling is probably the most critical thing that's going to ensure we can be sustainable. And I think we don't need to look very far to see examples of where industry has not taken responsible gambling as seriously as they should have and what the consequences of those actions have been. And I think here in the United States and North America, more broadly, we're all working to avoid that because we want to ensure our customers are taken care of because when you take care of your customer, your customer will take care of you and the bottom line. But if you can't take care of your customer, if you're burning them out, if you're putting them in positions where they can do harm to themselves and not advocating for them as an operator, you are putting yourself, the bottom line and the sustainability of the industry in jeopardy. and it makes all of us look bad. So for us at BetMGM, we link customer experience and responsible gambling together. And if our goal is to create the best experience possible for our customers, one that they want to experience over and over again and have a good time and play positively with us, then we need to take responsible gambling seriously and we need to give them the tools and information to empower them to bet. within their means at an appropriate level, understanding their own risk tolerances. And when they're not doing that, we have to have the courage to advocate for them and make sure that we get them to the resources that they need and that we partner with KindBridge or the councils or other groups so that we can get them to those resources which will hopefully help them get on the road to recovery and be okay with that. And we're not talking about everyday small players. There are VIPs who... who have issues from time to time. How are we addressing those? How are we helping them? I have a close relationship with our VIP team. I meet with the director of both sports and casino VIP on a weekly basis. We have channels where we are sharing information with each other to make sure that those players who may be exhibiting some concerning warning signs are being reviewed by my team. We're providing education to all of the hosts on a frequent basis, quarterly. and we're making sure that we are working together to take care of those players as well. And if that means we need to close that account, so be it. And that's the stand that we take. We're gonna put the player's well-being above everything else because when you do that, in return, the player will give you loyalty and you won't create the harm that unfortunately can occur due to somebody's gambling addiction. Yeah, and I was just gonna also piggyback on that, Rich. I think the other thing is that people can ebb and flow in this space and can kind of have areas where they go into risky behavior and then they come back out. And what we wanna make sure is that we all agree, I would assume that problem gamblers or people who have trouble controlling their gambling is not a sustainable player base. It just, it doesn't work. It does not sustain. any kind of growth. And so what we wanna do, and what I think we all are working toward is really making sure that we have an educated player base. If you've heard me, you've heard me say it a hundred times, I truly believe the best educated workforce will translate down to the most informed player base. And so when we go to work and we put in responsible gaming in our thinking and kind of, whether it's... Omni front of mind or it's kind of in your head at somewhere. You're always thinking about how are we going to educate? How are we going to get players to have a paradigm shift in some respects and have us destigmatize engagement with tools and how people can get a better sense of their play experience by utilizing tools and kind of get rid of the, this is. responsible gaming tools for people who might have a problem. No, these are responsible gaming tools to be responsible in the environment, in the space, so that you can have fun, you can enjoy yourself, and you can be a sustainable player that comes back time and time. And so I think, you know, piggybacking on what Rich said, we are the same way. If, you know, if it gets to the point where somebody is really having difficulty and they're communicating with our customer service, and our player protection team engages with them, we do not have a problem saying, okay, this is it. We are not, you're not allowed to engage with our platform anymore. And I think, you know, ultimately people probably appreciate that. Is that something you're finding easier to do as time goes on? Are you having, still having internal battles with other departments? Or is that happening less these days? I used to call it an eternal tug of war, you know, between departments. The total number of times any commercial team has pushed back on our decision to close an account is zero. and I don't see that number changing any time in the future. And it's in part because of the education that we provide through Epic, but it's also in part because our team members are some of the most empathetic and caring service providers that I've ever worked with in this industry. And we purposefully look for them when we're recruiting people to work within our space because it's central to what we're trying to do, is provide a great service and a great experience to our customers. And you can't do that if you don't care about other people. And so with that, it's really easy for us when we are reviewing accounts and making that ultimate decision to close an account because we've empowered them and we've educated them on this topic in the ways that we do throughout the year. This has been a big difference we've seen in the work we've done between Europe and North America is in Europe, people are on their fourth, fifth gambling industry job. Often it's the first time over here. Theresa, what makes a good RG person? That's a big question. I've gone off script now. I'm just putting them on the spot. The ability to influence others within the organization and get buy-in. Again, none of this can be done alone. It needs to touch every single staff and every single business function. So when we think about the worst case scenario for somebody with gambling addiction, suicide, right? So if you think about the actual customer journey. and what that may look like in the level of risk that has on a brand, what does it say when it's a poorly trained, often younger person who's just graduated on the other side in the customer service seat taking that call or taking that text or taking that email? So, you know, I think a lot of it goes back to just being able to convey, convey this message to others and get them, you know, get them amped about it, because it is an actually very fun space. Prevention. Prevention is extremely fun. So how do we generate excitement internally? Any other thoughts on that, on what makes the perfect RGE person? I mean, I'd say empathy is a big one. I mean, this is a space where we're not talking about easy topics here. And often, we're engaging with a range of stakeholders. So I mean, internally, we're having discussions across the organization to. really make sure that this is being prioritized in the right way throughout the organization and that everyone understands the importance and the impact of responsible gaming. And beyond that, we're talking to stakeholders throughout the industry. And I think you really need to be able to listen and understand the different perspectives and viewpoints, because it's critical to actually show some progress. I wanted to pick up early, you mentioned incentivizing our G tools. Could you expand on that a little bit for us? Because I think that's something that not everybody is doing. I find it quite interesting. Yeah, absolutely. And I'll say, I'll caveat that we're in the early stages here. We're doing a lot of pilots these days. But really, too, test and learn. So then we're actually scaling evidence-based solutions. And the first thing we did around incentivization was during problem gambling awareness month in March. And we selected five retail locations around the country. We ran a promotion called Set and Get. And we promoted it through the locations. And if you set an RG tool, you could choose a piece of swag. We then measured it afterwards. We tracked the tool usage behavior. We also had folks take a survey to be able to identify any shifts in attitudes or reported behaviors. Saw some positive early indicators. We're going to do it again at a larger scale in September. And then the other incentivization effort was really around the sweepstakes that I mentioned before. So that's just ended, so we don't have the results for it yet. I don't think it will surprise anyone to hear that the click-through rate's on. a promotion that includes the sweepstakes rather than just a straight kind of RG, check out our tools. The sweepstakes performed a lot better. But really, I think we're testing out different messages, different ways in the customers to get them to engage in a way with RG, where it doesn't feel like we're just trying to spoon feed spinach to people. And we're doing it in a way where we're actually convincing players that this is going to equip them to have a better experience. And I assume you're gonna share some of those results with us so we can understand if they work well. Of course. Awesome. Rising tide of the soul ships. We look forward to it. I mean, one of the things that we use in our education, we talk about educated players, is we teach it on a spectrum. And on the left-hand side of that spectrum, that is the place for kind of education. And then intervention lives on the right-hand side of that spectrum. When do you think the right point is to intervene with a customer's journey? Right when they register for an account. And so I know the other operators have a similar practice, but... upon registering for a BetMGM account, you are going to get a GameSense email which highlights the importance of gambling responsibly, shows where the tools and information can be found to help a player have the right mindset about their wagering, and gives them links to our customer service team should they have any issues as well. So from the very start, we try to educate our players because we understand that in many of our jurisdictions, this is a brand new activity for a lot of folks. So we want to give them that information from the beginning and then throughout the year as well, keeping communication going with them so that they know if they ever do have an issue, there's a team that can help them get them the resources that they need in a supportive and hopefully an effective way. So we start from right at the beginning with responsible gambling and interacting with our customers. Yeah, one of the things that we do that I think has been very successful is that we send out dedicated specific responsible gaming messages on a monthly basis. And there is no CTA on this. They are just getting information about responsible gaming, either tools or how to engage with our tools or how, you know, if they feel that they're gambling too much, then maybe they want to take a break or if they've been on for too long, step back, take a break. And so... They are right from the get-go. We are engaging with them with responsible gaming messages so that it is part of the experience that they have on our site. And we've seen tremendous unsub rates. People are clicking through. We've got a great click-through rate. People are actually looking at it, which I think is really great and helpful. And again, we're going to be working towards getting more metrics around that. But I think just having specific messages that don't say anything about. kind of what's up next is just responsible gaming messaging. I think really helps destigmatize the dialogue around responsible gaming and helps us move towards this preventative model where we're trying to get people to utilize and engage and participate in the tools and resources that we offer. Okay, I think we'll leave it there. Can I have a big hand for my amazing panel of experts? Thank you.