Gambling - Online Gambling Review Published.

The Gambling Commission has now published there review of the Online Gambling industry. 

Following the implementation of the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014; which required online Operators whose services are available in Great Britain to obtain an Operating Licence from the Commission, Great Britain now has the largest regulated online gambling market in the world.

The Review includes a number of recommend policies aimed at making the industry safer for customers. 

Proposed changes and action include:

• Further protecting children by banning operators from providing free-to-play demo games until a consumer’s age has been determined.
• Improving the speed and effectiveness of age verification processes.
• Ensuring operators set limits on consumers’ spending until affordability checks have been conducted.
• Tackling unacceptable marketing and advertising and unfair terms, and improving complaints and disputes procedures.
• Strengthening requirements to interact with consumers who may be experiencing, or are at risk of developing, problems with their gambling.
• The review also identifies five areas where the Commission is undertaking further work during the coming year.

 The Commission is going to:

• Assess the effectiveness of the current tools available to consumers to manage their gambling.
• Review gambling product characteristics to identify whether particular features pose greater risk of harm than others.
• Review our requirements on the protection of customer funds and consider whether there are sufficient protections around dormant accounts.
• Consider whether gambling on credit should continue to be permitted.
• Consider whether we need to make changes to ensure that consumers can withdraw funds more easily.

The full report can be found here.