Alec Gehlot: "A player who feels looked after doesn't leave the regulated market"

Alex Gehlot, PlaySignal CEO and Founder, talks about the merits of taking care of customers and how that directly impacts channelization in the regulated market, canceling out the appeal of offshore brands that often come with poor consumer protection in place.

Q: What inspired you to create PlaySignal, and what problem in the iGaming industry did you feel needed to be addressed differently?

Things fell apart fast for the UK industry. The 40% tax increase landed. The black market doubled in two years. Self-exclusion among young adults jumped 40% in a single year. I watched the regulated future disappearing in real time. And nobody was coming to fix it.

The industry's answer to responsible gaming has always been binary: let a player keep playing, or shut them out entirely. Both options fail. Cut a player off and they don't stop playing, they just go to the black market, where there are no limits, no checks and no protections. That's not player protection. That's exporting the problem. Do nothing instead, and you lose the player's trust, the regulator's patience, and eventually your licence.

I've never accepted that protection and revenue are enemies. A player who feels looked after doesn't leave the regulated market and keeping them there is the whole game. Not just for operators. For everyone.

Here's the uncomfortable truth PlaySignal is built on: this industry has spent decades perfecting the science of getting players to spend more. We use the same science. We just point it the other way and cool players down when they’re overheating.

Q: PlaySignal focuses on helping players better understand changes in their own gambling behaviour and risk. Why do you think giving players greater visibility and awareness is so important?

Nobody changes their behaviour because of generic information, they change when they see their own patterns. Telling a player "gambling can be risky" does nothing. Showing them "your sessions have doubled in length this week" is impossible to ignore, because now it's about them. That's why visibility matters: awareness only works when it's personal.

The industry's usual answer is more education, and it's a cop-out. Nobody visits a gambling site to learn. We're not Duolingo. Players already don't want to end up addicted or broke. They don't need a course or more FAQs. They need the truth about their own play, while they're still in a state to hear it.

Games are fine-tuned to cater to every emotion. If awareness is going to compete with them, it has to be built like them.

Q: Responsible gaming has traditionally been approached largely from a compliance perspective. Do you think the industry needs to start viewing player protection as an integral part of the overall player experience?

Player protection is now the only way regulated operators can set themselves apart from the black market.

Think about every other competitive moat: bonuses, game selection, odds, payout speed. The black market matches or beats regulated operators on all of them. Plus no tax burden,

no compliance costs, no restrictions. On pure product, the regulated market isn't ahead; in many cases it's behind.

The one thing the black market will never do is protect the player. It has no reason to. That's the moat. But it only works if protection is something players actually feel as part of their experience, not a compliance function running in the background to satisfy the regulator. Done as box-ticking, it's invisible to the player and does nothing to keep them. Done as part of the experience, it becomes the reason they stay.

Player protection isn't a compliance obligation or a moral nice-to-have. Competitively, it's the only move left.

Q: Technology and behavioural data are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Where do you see the greatest opportunities for innovation in responsible gaming over the next few years?

Responsible gaming hasn't seen real innovation in years. The reason is simple. The push has come from regulators imposing requirements, not from anyone trying to build something players want. So we end up with the minimum version of everything: pop-ups, questionnaires, generic limits.

That's what we're changing. The behavioural data now exists to understand each player individually: how their behaviour is shifting, when their risk is rising, what kind of interaction will actually land in that moment.

Instead of asking "what does the regulator require?", we can finally ask: what do players actually want? And the answer isn't complicated. They want to enjoy playing without it becoming a problem. And they want an operator that helps them do that without treating them like a suspect.

So the biggest opportunity of the next few years is responsible gaming becoming part of the experience rather than an apology attached to it. The operators that get this right won't just be more responsible, they'll be trusted. And trusted operators are the ones that survive.

Q: What do you think the iGaming industry still misunderstands about player behaviour and gambling-related risk?

The industry doesn't misunderstand player behaviour. It misunderstands how to use what it knows. The gap isn't knowledge. It's execution.

The iGaming industry is a world leader at getting players to spend more and stick around longer. I know because I worked on that side before PlaySignal. Every system for heating a player up is sophisticated, personalised, relentlessly tested and refined. Then you look at the systems for cooling a player down, and it's a pop-up and a deposit limit. We've built Formula 1 engines and bicycle brakes.

That's the misunderstanding: treating cooling players down as a compliance problem when it's an engineering problem. One the industry already knows how to solve, because it solved the exact same problem in the other direction. The moment cooling systems are as effective as heating systems, we can successfully manage a player journey end to end.

Q: From an education perspective, do you think professionals working in areas such as marketing, CRM, customer support, and product receive enough training in responsible gaming and player psychology? What should the industry improve?

In my experience, yes. Most people in marketing, support and product genuinely understand responsible gaming and want to do right by players. What's missing is that knowing the right thing and being able to do it are two different problems, and the industry has only solved the first one.

I saw this first-hand with marketing teams. You'd have marketers who could target with precision with spend, engagement, predicted value, and who knew exactly what player harm looks like. What they couldn't see was which players in their campaign list were showing those signs. The segment tools surfaced value; nothing surfaced risk. So a marketer would send a bonus offer to a player showing clear signs of harm. Not because they didn't know better, but because nothing in their workflow could tell them. All that education, undone by the tooling.

So if the industry wants to improve, put player risk in front of teams at the moment they're making decisions. Do that, and responsible gaming stops being something teams know about and becomes something they do. That's the gap PlaySignal closes. The first responsible gambling tool designed with marketers in mind.

Q: What knowledge or skills should newcomers to iGaming develop early in their careers if they want to contribute to a safer, more responsible, and more sustainable industry?

Be bold. Come in knowing you can actually change this industry. iGaming is a big industry that behaves like a small one, and people are willing to hear you out. But boldness needs something behind it, so I'd pair it with two things.

First, learn the player, not just the marketing view of what makes people spend, but the full picture. If you understand the player, you can contribute to any conversation in the business, from product to compliance. Second, learn both sides of the equation: how revenue is made and how players are protected, including how risk develops. Most people in this industry only ever learn one side.

The people who understand both are the ones who build what's next, because the future of this industry lives at exactly that intersection. Do that, and when your bold idea comes, people won't just hear you out. They'll act on it.

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