Focus on Safer Gambling Week 2023, Veikkaus confirms job cuts

The week of November 13 was marked by Safer Gambling Week 2023, an industry-wide initiative that focused on once again raising awareness standards across the board about the importance of preventative education, responsible play, and helping move past gambling harm.

Casino Guru and Casino Guru News were pleased to conduct several initiatives of their own on the occasion of Safer Gambling Week 2023 (November 13-19), including a new partnership with Casino Guru and Mindway AI that allows consumers to test their gambling habits and get an honest breakdown of potential red markers in their behavior. This is the second year the companies have collaborated on a similar initiative, as empowering consumers is the right way forward.

Our team had the pleasure to speak with Jo Abergel, Co-founder of the Ethical Gambling Forum who discussed Safer Gambling Week 2023 passionately. She insisted that the more focused Safer Gambling Week is, the more likely it is to have an impact that makes meaningful, lasting changes. She also touched on the importance of understanding how different consumer groups are impacted differently by gambling harm and gambling as a whole.

We also set down with Robert Lindsay from ClearStake and Svend Aage Kirk from Future Anthem as part of a roundtable, and with whom we discussed the pragmatic implications of Safer Gambling Week and the fact that responsible gambling has become a challenging process in which the needs of different parties need to be balanced.

Although both speakers welcomed the opportunity to see events such as Safer Gambling Week 2023 gather momentum, they were sobering about the fact that operators need to step up to the plate when it comes to practical player protection.

Consumer protection really needs to permeate company culture for it to really work and for Safer Gambling Week to have an impact, echoed our guest speakers as part of the All Things Gambling webinar series, with our latest episode focusing on Customer Care in the Gambling Industry: Gambling-harm Prevention.

There, Kevin O’Neill from Responsible Gaming Foundation, David Richardson from Better Change, and Maris Catania from Integrity Analytics expressed a similar message of hope and confidence regarding the future of responsible play, but they too said that operators can on occasion be reluctant to embrace responsible play in the fullest, most meaningful way.

While responsible gambling researchers and analysts have had their fair deal of reservations, many companies from the industry have stepped up in our "The Voice of the Industry" piece dedicated to Safer Gambling Week 2023, and reaffirmed their commitment to the cause and explained what Safer Gambling Week means to everyone.

Speaking of making the industry a safer place, our interview with Sonia Wasowska offered a tremendous insight into regulatory and compliance matters and how they impact companies’ commitment to responsible gambling. Preventative education is one of the main focuses that companies should also be working on, she noted.

Industry and Business

Clearly, Safer Gambling Week took up a lot of our time this week, and we think with a good reason, too. Regardless, we also had time to catch up with quite a few individuals from the industry who discussed matters beyond RG and customer care.

Casino Guru had been following the string of successes, including a recent fundraising by Rivalry, and we had the opportunity to catch up with Andre Nogueira Senior Manager of Game at Rivalry, with whom we discussed how Rivalry continues to be a disruptor in the betting and gaming space, and how the company seeks differentiation through proprietary and exclusive games that are geared towards the next generation of players.

We also had the chance to dive deep into Ukraine’s newest proposed gambling regulation changes with Dmitry Hotsyn from 4H Agency. Hotsyn dove deep into the regulatory framework and spoke about the implications of the draft if passed. 4H Agency has consistently provided some of the most worthwhile interpretations of regulatory challenges across various markets, and specifically Ukraine, so for any business looking to break ground in the country, this OP by Hotsyn is a must-read.

Meanwhile, Veikkaus confirmed this week that there will indeed be layoffs planned ahead of the change of the model in the country. Finland is going to go from a state monopoly to a more liberal licensee-based market in which private companies will compete against Veikkaus. This influx of new operators is already making Veikkaus go on the defensive, but the confirmed layoffs are fewer than expected and the operator still supports the regulatory change.

In another milestone development this week, West Virginia became the fifth state to join the Multi-State Internet Gaming Agreement, which will allow poker players from the state to enjoy a tremendous boost to the cash games they can access and tournament prize pools. It’s a big step forward for online poker in the United States. West Virginia will most likely pool its liquidity with the other states at some point in early 2024.

On the occasion of Safer Gambling Week, we felt compelled to also cover all news stories about gambling addiction numbers. Germany seems to have at least 4.6m consumers who are struggling with some form of gambling-related issue, a report published by Federal Drugs Commissioner Burkhard Blienert this week outlined.

ESPN, the media giant, has confirmed that it has donated $200,000 to The University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV)’s International Gaming Institute (IGI) to host a new program that focuses on five main pillars designated to raise awareness about responsible gambling advertisement and gambling-related harm at a time when ESPN is too joining the sports wagering space through its ESPN BET brand.

Image credit: Casino Guru News