Maris Catania in SGT with Šimon Vincze: “I even got cyberbullied at some points”

Casino Guru’s Head of Sustainable & Safer Gambling, Šimon Vincze, sits down with Maris Catania, who has recently taken on a new role as Director of Player Sustainability at LeoVegas Group, in the latest episode of Safer Gambling Talks.

Maris is best known as an independent consultant and researcher in the field of online gambling, so this move (a shift to the operator side) has been a truly significant one.

Vincze asked Maris why she decided to take this step and what continues to inspire and motivate her after all these years. But that’s not all. The duo discussed how operators, regulators, and academics can work together and what challenges come with conducting research.

Vincze and Catania touched upon self-exclusion and its current progress, and also reflected on the early stages of the Journey to Zero project. The conversation kicked off with a direct question, commenting on Catania’s most recent job with LeoVegas Group and what motivated her to sign up.

Catania explained that the culture LeoVegas Group promoted in its office immediately felt "like home," and she felt drawn to working with the RG team at the company, even before she officially joined and was only consulting.

"There was such a level of trust, there was such a motivation for a change, that I kind of missed being part of the change," Catania shared.

She highlighted LeoVegas Group’s commitment to the player journey as a whole and not just focusing on drawing negative conclusions about players, plowing efforts into early interventions, and helping players practice their hobby responsibly.

Catania and Vincze also touch on the semantics of responsible gambling, and terms such as "responsible gambling," "safer gambling," and "player sustainability" – the third is Catania’s preferred term as well. The two touch on how gambling companies leverage extensive data and can assist customers in finding out more about their own gambling habits.

Vincze touches on Casino Guru’s Global Self-Exclusion Initiative and Kindred Group’s ambitious Journey to Zero, two efforts aimed at encouraging more companies to support players in self-excluding and to maintain transparency about what percentage of their revenue comes from harmful gambling.

Catania and Vincze then explore the industry’s hesitation around "nudging" customers too much.

Many operators avoid intervening unless there is a clear reason to do so, which leads them to refrain from even displaying basicinformation such as how long a player has been online. This reluctance comes from weighing the potential benefits against what they perceive as significant risks associated with being too proactive.

Catania and Vincze also dive into research and explore the reasons why few academics are actually collaborating more openly with the industry and operators to get actionable data and translate it into potentially impactful research. Catania has specifically been called out as both a gambling and an anti-gambling lobbyist.

Catania spoke about the stigma, and that even when presenting peer-reviewed materials, some fellow researchers would be skeptical about the validity of the data, fearing that it had been fed selectively to produce a desired outcome. Suspicion remained.

Then again, Catania shared how she was also called an anti-gambling lobbyist, which she said was "wearing like a badge of honor." When Catania was starting to work in the industry and focused on research, she set clear lines, telling Kindred Group’s Ewout Keuleers: "You cannot tell me what to publish and what not to publish if you allow me to do that. You have to trust me."

At which point he Keuleers: "What is the worst thing that you can find that we don’t know?" It is this type of attitude, argues Catania, that is perhaps missing more broadly across the industry. As she argues, "you need a certain type of people to allow it."

The full episode of Safer Gambling Talks with Maris Catania and Šimon Vincze is well worth watching in its entirety. Find out more great video interviews and content at Casino Guru News’ YouTube channel.

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