Play Well

Having pioneered the Take a Break product in 2015, Sportsbet has long advocated for a simple solution that allows customers to take breaks and exclude themselves from all wagering accounts in one step. In August 2023, the Australian government launched BetStop, the National Self Exclusion Register, enabling players to exclude themselves from all online and phone wagering operators simultaneously. There was strong early take up of the register with over 10,000 registrations between August and October 2023.

As part of a series of new initiatives during Responsible Gaming Education Month in September, FanDuel announced a new partnership with Front Office Sports to launch a first-of-its-kind, free responsible gaming educational course. Aimed at professionals across the sports industry, it intends to raise awareness of the importance of responsible gaming and encourage use of tools like deposit and time limits. Hosted on Front Office Sports’ learning platform, it covers the fundamentals of responsible play and features content from FanDuel Executives, our Responsible Gaming Ambassador Craig Carton, and representatives from the National Council on Problem Gambling and the NBA. People who complete the course can add a badge to their LinkedIn profile and include the certification on their resumes. The three-module course launched in January 2024, ahead of the NFL playoffs. Since launch, the course has been promoted across social media channels with more than 116,000 impressions to date. Among those who have completed the course, 99% feel that they better understand what Responsible Gaming means and how FanDuel is leading the charge in responsible gambling education.

In March 2024, Fanduel was announced as one of the initial members of The Responsible Online Gaming Association (“ROGA”), an independent trade association launched by seven of the largest US legal mobile gaming companies. ROGA will actively promote a new industry-wide best practices charter, overseen by Dr. Jennifer Shatley, one of the world’s foremost experts in the field of responsible gaming with more than 25 years of experience in the industry.

ROGA will operate with specific purpose, with an aim towards driving the most meaningful impact toward responsible gaming education. It’s work will be centered around key pillars of focus; research, promoting best practice, education and awareness, and data.

Initial member companies – who together represent more than 85 percent of the legalized online sports betting and iGaming industry in the US – have pledged more than $20 million in support of ROGA’s mission in year one.

Betfair and Paddy Power continued to lead progress, joining a groundbreaking pilot with other big operators. GamProtect safeguards vulnerable customers through a new UK data-sharing service. When a player makes us aware they’re at risk of problem gambling, we continue to apply appropriate self-exclusion but now also share their details to the GamProtect register. Operators in the pilot query the register daily and can identify whether the same customer has an account with their brand, allowing them to close it and further reduce potential for harm. Since launch, over 4,200 customers have received enhanced protection.

In 2023, PokerStars began a program to implement a Positive Play Scale (“PPS”) survey, working with Doctor Richard Wood, a psychologist specializing in the study of gaming behavior at GamRes, which provides research and consultancy to design, implement and evaluate responsible gambling strategy. The PPS was developed in 2017 and is the first ever standardized scale to measure responsible gambling-related beliefs and behaviors among players. By identifying customers’ levels of personal responsibility, gambling literacy, honesty, control and pre-commitment, the survey results will provide us with a better understanding of our players so that we can offer more tailored engagement strategies.

In 2023, FanDuel expanded its Responsible Gaming Ambassador Program to include global soccer icon Carli Lloyd and PGA TOUR rising star Tom Kim. They are partnering with us to raise awareness of responsible play and the tools we provide to fans, including deposit, wager and time limits.

The Ambassador program was developed to build a team of external advocates, using unique voices and reducing stigma. In 2021, acclaimed sports radio and TV personality Craig Carton became our first ambassador, and this year we paired Carton with NFL legend Rob Gronkowski and FanDuel TV host Kay Adams. They took part in a candid podcast-style discussion about problem gambling and in FanDuel FanDial, surprising fans with video calls and talking to them about our self-service responsible gaming tools.

Sportsbet has developed an innovative Real Time Intervention (“RTI”) product which aims to prevent harm rather than simply minimize it after its commencement. RTI uses sophisticated artificial intelligence technology to predict the upper limit of a unique customer’s next daily deposit. When a customer exhibits depositing behavior that exceeds their personal predicted upper limit, a real time intervention is triggered. The intervention is proactive and is based on three categories of risk, with the level of intervention matched to the risk category. We currently have a cohort of our customer base enrolled in RTI, with the goal of achieving 100% of enrolled customers minus a control group by the end of 2024. We are tracking early positive signs that the tool is driving behavior change, including increased adoption of deposit limits.

In 2023, Sisal began exploring a risk identification model for online customers, including the introduction of an anti-dependence algorithm
(“ADA”) which received a patent certificate from the Ministero delle Imprese for industrial invention. PokerStars also started to explore pilot initiatives with third parties specializing in AI solutions. In addition, changes to enhance customer interaction in the UK and Spain have been applied as best practices in line with new mandated requirements.

Given the scale and diversity of Flutter International, we will use the results and learning from all the work outlined above to further strengthen our capabilities and responsible gambling programs across the division.

In 2023, Flutter funded the Responsible Gambling Council to carry out a cross-operator/jurisdictional research project on gambling marketing and advertising within Ontario and New Jersey markets. The first and second phases of this research have been completed and provide incremental findings towards the third phase of the project which seeks to address regulatory and operational knowledge gaps through consolidating existing evidence and emerging leading practices into: 1) an operator roadmap; 2) an approach for global regulatory benchmarking; and 3) policy recommendations for multi-layered operating environments. The Responsible Gambling Council is a respected, independent non-profit organization and has been a leader in the prevention of problem gambling in Canada and globally for 40 years. Its team of responsible gambling experts provides guidance with the operational knowledge required to support players.

In 2023, FanDuel continued to support the important work of non-profit organizations focused on preventing problem gambling. In March, we announced a donation to the National Council on Problem Gambling (“NCPG”) for their Agility Grants program, in partnership with the NFL Foundation. It offers funding to non-profits across the country for problem gambling prevention initiatives and aims to fill gaps in areas that have no such services, as well as bolster promising efforts in existing projects.

Schemes funded in 2023 include an initiative to prevent problem gambling among people who are deaf and hard of hearing; a graphic novel about youth gambling prevention; and a responsible gambling program for college athletes.

FanDuel also expanded support of the International Center for Responsible Gaming (“ICRG”) to fund ground-breaking research into gambling behavior in the US. With this research, ICRG and FanDuel aim to enhance the industry’s tools to identify potential harm, mitigate risk, and improve responsible gambling programs.

We introduced a Close My Account feature, making it easier for Betfair, Paddy Power and Sky Betting & Gaming customers to close their accounts online. UK Gambling Commission research found that around 37% of people using self-exclusions tools were actually doing so to shut their accounts and stop receiving marketing materials – not for the intended purpose of managing gambling concerns. Before we launched the new feature, players needed to contact our Customer Service team, but now it’s simpler and easier for them to close their account themselves. The improvement removes unnecessary friction for customers and has reduced the number of inbound contacts about account closures by more than half. More importantly, this initiative minimizes the number of people using the self exclusion tool when it is not required in their situation, giving us higher-quality self exclusion data to train and improve our models.