Gamban’s Stephen Aupy: “Gamban’s reach is multi-jurisdictional and multi-lingual”

The SBC Summit Barcelona 2022 was an opportunity for the Casino Guru News team to meet with many industry specialists and talk about some of the most pressing matters in the industry. One such is problem gambling and how companies like Gamban have been helping operators and regulators address the issue. We spoke with Gamban’s VP of Partnerships, StephenAupy, who helped us understand Gamban’s efforts so far, the increase in the tool’s adoption, and how operators have been more willing to collaborate with a proven benchmark company that has focused on helping consumers remain protected.

Q1:Gamban is by far one of the most successful companies for restricting access to gambling operators online for the sake of protecting consumers from gambling-related harm. How have you achieved this?

Gamban’s journey has been an interesting one, that has consisted of a lot of trial and error, initially, the company came to market more than seven years ago. Back then we came to the market by offering a free solution, but we quickly realized that we cannot have a sustainable business strategy by offering free tech. So, we then had to really think bout how we could collaborate with the industry.

We set up a B2B arm and sought to understand where most people with gambling problems present. The obvious answer to that question is through operator platforms. That’s where they present through self-exclusion. So, we felt that the best way to mitigate or reduce gambling harm is through gambling operators under the pretense that it would be easy to get adoption.

Four and a half years ago a large shift towards safer gambling began, through various initiatives, including the gambling reform in the UK. We also wanted to play a part in that shift. We started partnering with gambling operators such as Flutter, Kindred Group, Entain, and so on. We work with gambling operators to enhance their self-exclusion process by integrating Gamban as a URL integration through their CRMs, when someone self-excludes through an operator platform they also get Gamban protection on their devices to help them on their road to recovery.

Over the last few years, we have also curated one of the most extensive gambling block lists in the industry and we use AI to achieve this. The AI scrapes the internet every day for new websites, but the final check is actually done by the human eye, and there is definitely a human element to blocking because we definitely do not want to overclock. Our blocklist has become a labor of love over the years and is very extensive in terms of its coverage of legit gambling sites.

So, as our list continued to grow, so did awareness among licensed gambling operators. We now have more than 67,000 blocked websites added on different conditions and it finally seems like regulators like the UKGC & others are finally beginning to pay attention to how we are one of the few tools to be able to tackle black market offenders at a device level.

We have already attended events and talked about gambling harm and problem gambling alongside GamStop and GamCare. We think that the regulatory interest lies with us being one of the only tools to actually mitigate unlicensed gambling harm. Obviously, the Nordic & British markets gambling markets are massive.

As such, there is a lot of learning to do but the work we do is already starting to transcend elsewhere, into the US, into Africa, into Latin America, and we are now slowly becoming a globally recognized tool to help curb gambling addiction. For Jack and Matt, Gamban has been a true labor of love, a passion project that has grown into something that is truly transforming lives for the better and I am very happy to have played my role in the company.

Q2: Do you see reluctance on the part of players when using Gamban? And if so, how do you incentivize people to try your product and see its benefits?

There is no reluctance from users. The nature of gambling addiction is that people do not want to discuss it as unfortunately there is still a real stigma around gambling disorder. People come to our website because they want help with their urges. So, no, we have not seen that much reluctance from people to adopt. In fact, a tougher area has been to make operators adopt the tool for distribution.

If we look at the nature of gambling, and the business model of gambling operators there is a contrast in what we are both trying to achieve commercially. So, in the early days, operators were more reluctant to work with Gamban because they were afraid that it would affect their revenue. Now, there has been a cultural shift towards responsible gambling and the idea that responsible gambling now equals industry sustainability.

Of course, operators have been worried about the commitment they make – for example, you can have Gamban for a period between six and five years, and having Gamban for a period of five years, well, some may find this to be too much of a commitment.

So, I suppose you can find reluctance along those ways – that’s the only type of reluctance I have seen when it comes to rolling out Gamban’s products and services.

Q3: Gamban does have a pricing model which is understandable. Do you think this is a problem for consumers to get started? We understand that some operators have been happy to pick up this charge and pay for consumers to stay safe, is this true and if so, how do you see the future of Gamban and its revenue model?

Well, we need to remember that Gamban is a project that started through lived experience. We created Gamban during a timeframe when blocking software wasn’t cross-compatible with the everyday devices that everyone uses today. So, that is why we brought Gamban to market. It was difficult to do, but we did it and we stay on top to this day which still remains to be a difficult task for our tech team.

The reason why we set a pricing model is that if we were to become an NGO or take funding from the industry, we would be controlled by the industry. We are not anti-gambling. I enjoy gambling on sports from time to time, but we are pro-sustainable gambling.

So, what we do is to offer a seven-day free trial and then consumers can move onto a weekly or monthly payment option that amounts to slightly over GBP2 a month, which we hope is affordable. In fact, we have been told by multiple people that we are offering our software too cheap.

We acknowledge that when so many people have hit the red zone, they have exhausted all their capacity to actually buy anything. So, we have set up the seven-day free trial along with an extremely affordable monthly option as there is solid protection for those that really need it.

Q4: Has there been an increase in the number of people who register to use Gamban?

Yes! It’s very interesting because we started to take a record of the traffic that comes through to our website. The truth is we have pretty much traffic from every jurisdiction in the globe for the moment and one of the things we have noticed is that there is a significant rise in the traffic to our website. This lets us know that gambling addiction is a growing global problem that is not going to go away and it’s partially because of the proliferation of online gambling.

Right now, there is a gold rush explosion in online sports betting in the United States and what comes naturally with an increase in gambling activity is unfortunately a rise in problem gambling. So, there is a significant rise in traffic. We have seen also a stronger adoption of our tool through the B2C website, and we can see that many people who sign up do not have English as their native language.

So, this tells us that we are on the right track and while we are on the topic of localization, we want to make sure that people who seek Gamban can understand it and its features completely so we want to localize better.

Months ago, we localized into Spanish and what you are going to see in the coming weeks is the availability of Gamban in another language. We are localizing, definitely. We were praised by several operators for being able to act as a tool that helps tackle problem gambling regardless of the jurisdiction, too.