Kindred takes responsibility for ensuring that our products are only used as a form of entertainment and that our customers play within their means. We aim to prevent harmful gambling by investing in expertise and technology.
The majority of our customers enjoy our offering in sports betting, casino and games the way it is intended, as a form of entertainment. A very small percentage use our products in a way they are not intended to be used. For these customers, gambling stops being entertaining and can cause harm to their physical, emotional, and financial health as well as to the people around them. Kindred is committed to prevent and minimize harmful gambling, and therefore we have set an ambition to eliminate harmful gambling from our platform. But how do we do this?
Detecting harmful gambling
One crucial area of our business is the Responsible Gambling department. As a digital company, we create a digital footprint of our customers’ behavior on our platform. This allows us to detect, monitor and follow up on problematic gambling behavior and support our customers. We do this through our in-house tool that monitors player behaviour and detects harmful gambling; the Player Safety – Early Detection System (PS-EDS). The system scans our customers’ transactions and behaviors and applies a scoring system to plot customers in the risk framework.
PS-EDS identifies changes in customer behavior, such as chasing losses / winnings, financial limitations, re-investing winnings, and more. The indicators are based on research findings and we cooperate with leading experts in the field to ensure that we always apply the latest findings to the tool. Once PS-EDS has identified potential problematic gambling behavior with a customer, our highly trained Responsible Gambling team builds a profile of the customer and identifies suitable next steps. This often involves direct personal communication and recommendation of one or more of our control tools. In 2018, we contacted 30,000 customers with a responsible gambling message, and we have seen that after receiving direct communication from us, 72 % of customers adopt a healthier gambling behavior.
Have a look at the infographic video above to learn more about how we use PS-EDS to prevent harmful gambling.
Continued collaboration across the industry
Research findings are instrumental in shaping and developing PS-EDS and Kindred continues to collaborate with researchers as we know this is key in taking us towards our ambition of eliminating harmful gambling from our platform. Among other projects, we are involved in various research projects with Dr. Jonathan and Adrian Parke, and Dr. Mark Griffiths.
We strongly believe that collaboration across the industry is necessary to prevent harmful gambling. No single operator, supplier, regulatory authority, research centre or other expert can tackle these challenges alone. We must learn from each other and co-operate in partnership to improve our responsible gambling efforts.
