Increased focus on consumer protection at this year's show

Safer gambling is seldom out of the news and its importance has been recognised at ICE London again this year, when the Consumer Protection Zone (CPZ) will enjoy an enhanced location on the show floor and a footprint 30 per cent greater than in 2019.

At time of writing organisers Clarion Gaming had received sponsorship contributions totalling £65,000, beating the £35,000 which was presented to the Gordon Moody Association last February, with all proceeds from the sponsorship going to a gambling charity nominated by the sponsors and announced before the opening of the show.

Clarion Gaming’s director of industry insight and engagement, Ewa Bakun, said: “Based on the feedback from 2019, we have moved the location of the Consumer Protection Zone to a new area in hall N1, which is the first hall as visitors enter from Custom House DLR station.

“It’s right by the VIP Lounge which is a prime location guaranteeing high density traffic, in particular of ICE London’s C-Level attendees who use the lounge. The zone will also be significantly bigger, giving us more space to accommodate visitors and exhibitors.”

The Gordon Moody Association, which used the CPZ sponsorship fund to add more languages to its Gambling Therapy service and to increase its weekend support, believes ICE London provides an important platform for the social responsibility debate.

Rob Mabbett, gambling therapy manager at Gordon Moody, said: “For the Gordon Moody Association it is an important event as we look to develop existing relationships with the industry as well as forge new ones.

“For our international service, Gambling Therapy, ICE London provides us with an opportunity to network with the global gaming community helping us reach and support more and more people worldwide each year.”

Ewout Wierda, general counsel at Videoslots.com, believes the CPZ has become a key feature of ICE London.

He said: “Social responsibility is a cornerstone of building customer trust and is integrated in our business.

“We aim to be industry leaders in offering safe, transparent, fair and social entertainment. Likewise, the Consumer Protection Zone makes social responsibility a natural part of business when the industry meets at ICE London. We gladly support putting social responsibility at the heart of the industry.”

Following its support of last year’s CPZ, Kindred Group has once again got behind the initiative.

Its sustainability manager Anna Jein said: “Kindred is proud to again this year sponsor the Consumer Protection Zone at ICE London.

“We have to learn from each other and collaborate to improve our responsible gambling efforts. An event like ICE London gathers a huge range of stakeholders from the industry and it’s therefore an incredibly important scene to use to discuss responsible gambling and how we can work together towards a more sustainable industry.

“We are therefore also very happy to see that the CPZ has been moved to a more prominent area of the show floor – hopefully this will engage even more of the industry in these important dialogues.”

Lee Willows, co-founder and chief executive of YGAM, the charity that works to inform, educate and safeguard young people against problematic gambling and gaming, was another to welcome the enhancements to the CPZ.

He said: “YGAM has enjoyed a long-standing relationship with Clarion Gaming and without doubt ICE London provides an exceptional platform for charities to further raise awareness of their social purpose and to thank their supporters.

“The Consumer Protection Zone has evolved over the past couple of years and with a larger, more prominent area and planned pop-up talks around safer gambling and social responsibility across the show floor, ICE London continues to pioneer, lead and set the benchmark. It enables all organisations to not only take stock of current issues but as importantly, to plan for the future.”

Spotlight on safeguarding most vulnerable to gambling harms

Ibas chief executive Richard Hayler on ICE

With a small budget surplus from the previous year, Ibas first exhibited at ICE in February 2017. It was a surprisingly busy week.

For a commercial organisation, business cards from Peru, Rwanda, Israel, South Africa and countries across Europe would represent positive leads. For us, it was more about speaking to others on the importance in any territory of providing the industry’s customers with a meaningful place to turn if they believed that they had been treated unfairly by their gambling operator of choice.

What ‘unfair treatment’ of gambling consumers means to the wider world has changed substantially in those three years. In the statistical reporting year that ended in September 2016 dispute numbers were dominated by welcome bonuses and free bet offers. A poorly executed free bet offer concerning a number of new sportsbook brands and the Cheltenham Festival (where important restrictions had been left off a list of terms and conditions) had made the pages of several national papers and Radio 4’s You and Yours programme had contacted us for the first time to raise concerns about the transparency of online casino welcome bonus terms.

These types of issue dominated our agenda then. In comparison, complaints relating to what were then collectively classified as ‘responsible gambling matters’ arrived much less frequently. We recorded 228 in the year to October 2016, compared to 2,014 about promotional offers.

In the most recent year to October 2019 we received 512 disputes relating to promotional offers and 714 relating to safer gambling issues.

These included complaints that gambling operators had acted irresponsibly towards customers, complaints that self-exclusion systems had failed to work, or that payments of winnings had been withheld because of allegations that the account was being operated by a self-excluded person.

Last year, this type of complaint accounted for 14 per cent of all requests for adjudication that were received from UK consumers. With that in mind, it made sense for us to ask to return to exhibit in the Consumer Protection Zone (CPZ), where we were also represented at ICE 2019. We hope it will provide further opportunities for us to discuss our proposals to develop a Gambling Ombudsman from the foundations of 21 years of Ibas experience.

Although pleased with our inclusion in the CPZ last year, we made no secret about our dissatisfaction with its location – furthest of any stand from the main entrance and easily congested by virtue of its narrow passageway between the exhibitors’ areas.

Pleasingly, and to Clarion’s great credit, the feedback it received from a number of sources has led to welcome review of the situation and its relocation to a much more central and fitting home.

An illustration of the importance of the move is the return to exhibiting of the Gambling Commission, which had declined a stand at the past two renewals of ICE.

We will attend ICE with our eyes open. This is a vast exhibition of international gambling services with an overwhelming emphasis on innovation and sales. It would be unrealistic to imagine that the show will ever be most about providing a variety of necessary safety nets to the betting and gaming public. The Consumer Protection Zone is important though.

It seems to me that ICE sets out to be a focal point in the industry’s calendar and while the conferences that take place upstairs bring together some legal and compliance executives, we would love to see more visitors to our stand whose jobs bring them into direct contact with consumers.

Ibas hosts dispute avoidance seminars each year and invariably the most valuable and meaningful discussions take place informally, afterwards, where attendees relax and share ideas and experiences without fear of saying the ‘wrong thing’.

Bringing these people together matters and the chance for them to speak face to face with a range of those who are involved in the day-to-day identification, protection, treatment and support of problem gamblers, or potential problem gamblers, is an opportunity that shouldn’t be passed up.

At ICE we hope to meet people with ideas to improve consumer experiences in every respect. The focus of the CPZ will be in protecting those most vulnerable to gambling harms and Ibas will be as interested as anyone else in the latest initiatives in this area.

We also hope that others will embrace the wider meaning of ‘consumer protection’, the importance of fairness and transparency, of thinking about products from a consumer perspective and training employees to understand and communicate effectively and empathetically on the issues of greatest concern to their customers.

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If you are concerned about your gambling and are worried you may have a problem, click here to find advice on how you can receive help