The UK’s gambling industry regulator has introduced new rules that could affect how punters go about their business.
The Gambling Commission have made it mandatory that bookmakers and betting sites ask first-time depositors to set deposit limits on their account. So, if you sign up for a new account, you’ll have to state a daily, weekly and/or monthly limit on how much you can add to your balance.
The regulator also wants greater transparency when it comes to the financial protection afforded to punters. Currently, a betting site simply has to declare what level of protection their customers have should they go bust – licensed operators can even offer ‘no protection’, so if they go bankrupt then the funds in your account would be lost forever.
However, the Gambling Commission’s new rules should create greater transparency, enabling customers to find out exactly what protection is available to them without the hassle of scrolling through page after page of terms and conditions.
Good Practice
The new rules, which will be enforced from October 31 this year, will required all UK licensed bookies and betting apps to ‘prompt’ new customers to set financial limits prior to making their first deposit.
Many firms will already ask you to do this, but as of October it will become mandatory for all to do so.
Another new rule will make it easier for punters to review and alter their current deposit limit after their initial amount has been set. This will enable customers to easily lower their limits with a few taps of their screen if they feel that their betting is becoming problematic.
As part of these initiatives, licensed operators will also be required to contact their customers every six months, asking them to review their current deposit limit while making it easy for them to change the amount if they wish to.
The Gambling Commission has introduced a raft of changes in the wake of the review into the former Gambling Act, which was initiated by the previous government as part of their industry white paper.
According to the regulator, these new measures will make it ‘easier’ and ‘more effective’ for punters to closely monitor and change their online betting activity.
“These rules will take good practice already offered by some operators and expand that so customers can expect the same standards across the industry,” a spokesperson for the Commission commented.
The regulator is also willing to hear from punters on financial limits, with a new consultation on the matter to be launched soon. Bettors will be able to have their say on whether these tools need to be more transparent and easy to understand, or if they are about right as they currently are.
Understanding Financial Protection
At the time of writing, a UK licensed betting site only needs to give a very basic descriptor of how they look after the funds in your account.
They can, quite literally, just use the words ‘high protection’, ‘medium protection’, ‘no protection, but segregation of customer funds’ and ‘no protection at all’.
The distinction is important. With high or medium protection, you can reasonably expect to get the funds in your account paid out should the bookie go bust. But with the two types of no protection, there’s no guarantee that you’ll ever see a penny of that money again.
This isn’t to alarm you; most of the big-name UK bookmakers are financially solvent and in it for the long haul. But firms that are based overseas, or that can be described as a ‘soft’ book, can go to the dogs and are perhaps more likely to have no protection in place.
Under the Gambling Commission’s new guidelines, any firm with ‘no protection’ in place will be forced to remind their customers that that’s the case every six months, confirming that their funds could be lost in the case of insolvency.
“While there is no legal duty on gambling operators to protect customers funds in the event of insolvency, many of them do so voluntarily,” the regulator said.
“The changes will help consumers understand which operators protect their funds and which do not. This information will support them in making choices about who they gamble with.”
Although they’ve stopped short of explicitly saying so, it could be surmised that the Gambling Commission wants to gently elbow no protection bookmakers out of the UK market altogether.
You can find out what level of protection the betting sites you use has in place by checking out their terms and conditions, which can usually be found behind a link in the footer of their website or app.