Elliot Holidng
Account Manager
On Tuesday 6th September, I attended a brilliant customer forum on Safer Gambling, hosted by CTS, Google’s largest dedicated partner in EMEA.
Data from Google Search Trends set the scene to the forum, illustrating the scale of growth in the industry. Did you know that there are over 90 million Google gambling queries and 5 million YouTube queries every month? That’s a massive 30% year over year increase.
However, where there is growth there is also problem gambling. 1.4% of the UK’s gamblers are classified as problem gamblers, with surges in the number of gamblers self-excluding themselves online.
There are many behaviours displayed by problem gamblers with loss chasing, where the player tries to recover their losses by betting more, being one of them. This can be a complex behaviour over multiple years and is difficult to tackle in real-time when it is actually taking place. Anomalous deposits, where there are irregularities in the amounts, frequency and/or time of day, is another indicator.
The purpose of the forum was to explore the role that real-time data, AI and ML can play to identify these customers in real-time and to support them. While Google services such as BigQuery, BigQuery ML, Vertex AI and Looker provide the technical building blocks, implementation partners like CTS with real-world experience bring these solutions to life; allowing you to stream data directly into your data warehouse, visualise your data with real-time dashboards, and create custom classification and machine learning models to address these behaviours.
James Gornall, Cloud Architect Lead at CTS and self confessed data governance aficionado, gave an overview of how CTS helps customers achieve affordability modelling, bet behaviour, risk alerting and rich analytics through the CTS Responsible Gambling Model. Unified data ingestion is key, making use of both private and public gaming data to create solutions which are aggregated, secure and highly available.
Jenn Calland, Data Analyst at CTS and advocate extraordinaire of inspiring women into tech, brought this to life with a demo, showing what a mock customer profile might look like. We analysed their profit and loss trajectory vs. deposits and learned how to set up an automated alert when the deposit exceeded its regular amount, so that proactive action could be taken; an outright deposit rejection perhaps, or a call from the customer services team.
The CTS Responsible Gambling model starts with a safer gambling health check to assess your organisation’s objectives, and the existing data sets and solutions that are being used, in order to build a roadmap and set of recommendations based on your needs.
Get in touch with CTS to book your free safer gambling health check today.