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SBC Leaders Podcast is a series of interviews with CEOs and decision makers at some of the betting and gaming industry's biggest, best and most innovative companies. SBC's Kelly Kehn is the host who asks the questions.
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Hello there, I'm Andrew McCarron, I'm the Managing Director of SBC and this is SBC Leaders. With me today we've got Dr Jennifer Shatley who is the Executive Director of the Responsible Online Gaming Association, ROGA. Jennifer, how are you doing?
Thank you, it's nice to be here. So, can you give us a bit, provide a brief overview of what ROGA do, because they're quite a new organization, aren't they? Yes, so ROGA is a collective engagement among seven of the largest online sports betting and iGaming operators. They represent about 85 % of the US market, and they've come together really of an overarching goal to enhance responsible gaming and to protect the well -being of customers and to provide them with the information
tools and programs to really help protect their well -being and to keep gaming as the entertainment it was intended to be. And we have five main pillars that we're going to be doing this by. One would be research, and that's going to drive a lot of the initiatives that we engage in. Another is the creation and validation of best practices. You know, online gaming is a very new space. Responsible gaming itself is a fairly new space, but definitely within an online gaming environment. So we're looking at best practices.
best practices and establishing that within the online environment. Education and awareness initiatives across a variety of different audiences. A data clearing house to facilitate better information sharing amongst our operators. And then also an independent certification program to really assess and validate the robust responsible gaming programs that we have in place. Okay, how did you come to those? How did you narrow it down to those five pillars? I think those are the ones that we
really identify where we could have an impact and those are the ones that I think are lacking that there's not a lot of understanding again within the online space of how to do responsible gaming really well. You know, is it, do you take what's already been done within a bricks and mortar venue and just try to adapt that to online? Will that even work? Is that the best way? We don't know. So I think that's really where we can delve into how do you do this in the best way for that new environment and maybe it's something completely different because I do think there are advantages of online games.
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for responsible gaming because you know who your customer is, you see every transaction, every interaction, you're engaging directly with them so you can integrate responsible gaming tools directly into the experience instead of...
kind of hoping they do it because within an online environment you say set a budget but you don't give them the tools to do that. So we're looking at that and then education awareness is always incredibly important. Again, you're looking at a new cohort, a new type of player, making sure they understand how to engage in the product in a responsible way. And then also the certification is really to show, to build that trust that these operators are operating these robust programs.
and giving them sort of that stamp of approval. And then the data clearing house, again, it's important to understand holistically what a player is doing from a responsible gaming perspective. So if we can facilitate that and help better protect the customer, I think that's a win for our members and for the industry. So, sorry, just to go into the certification thing you were talking about there, is that like, you would get like GLI certified in sort of the slots and things like that? It would be similar to that.
would be an independent certification program, yes. Okay, excellent. You say social responsibility, the problem gambling side is quite new, but of course it's been a long -in -issue in land -based gambling even before the explosion of online gambling, of course that's where some of your background is. I mean, what was it about this project that appealed to you, you know, what are you looking forward to bringing to the aims of the organization? I think the collective approach of everyone coming together to have a sort of a more
meaningful and impactful voice was very appealing to me to me but my background so I've been doing responsible gaming for 25 years and I had the privilege of doing a lot of the firsts in the industry around responsible gaming in a land -based venue so I like to innovate I like to continue to push everything forward the field forward and I found this was an opportunity to do that especially within a space that's brand new I'll get to be the first executive director of this organization so again trying to establish
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and really improve and enhance what we're doing. But looking at innovative ways, technology is something I'm also very interested in. And the online space gives me a lot of opportunity as well to look at technology and how to integrate that more into the responsible gaming programs.
The creation of this has also been a response to how society has reacted to the opening up of the market and the seven members that you mentioned realizing that this should be an area that they're taking more seriously about. I think all of our members have their own responsible gaming programs so they are doing things in the space but I do think they understood that collectively we can do more and we can understand it better and be more effective.
they embraced that and came together to create ROGA. So with regards to those members, you've got a budget to start off with. It's about $20 million, is that right? But you've also got quite a few pillars to be looking at.
How are you allocating? How do you choose where that money goes? How much are you allocating to research and how confident are you that that's the right amount or is this going to be something that gets tweaked as you get more experience? Well, you know, we're about a month and a half old so we're still figuring out the exact allocations. I'm fortunate I do have a robust budget so I have money to play with around these initiatives but
We're looking to be very collaborative. So in terms of research, we want to engage with academics, with experts, with researchers to help us fill out that research agenda. And then we'll determine how much revenue should be going towards research. But again, research is going to drive a lot of what we do. It'll drive the best practices. It'll drive the creation of the certification program. It'll drive the creation of the education and awareness program. So it will be a robust budget around that. But yes, we'll be allocating
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funds across all five pillars because we're going to move all initiatives all at once. So with regards to somebody comes up with a research project asking for funding is it you making that decision or is there would there be a group of people advise like a board advising on what gets funding what doesn't get funded? We are going to we are creating an advisory board we're in the process of that right now of looking at who we think should compose that so it will be collaborative around assessing what should be funded and we'll have over
overarching categories of ideas that will help us because our intent with the research is really how can we inform what we're doing and how can we action and operationalize research because I have a research background as well and a lot of times as researchers we kind of do a research project, put it on the shelf and move on to the next research project. What we want to do is really take that research and translate what does that mean, how does that look in a gaming environment.
environment, how can that help us create these best practices, how can that help us with responsible gaming initiatives and really operationalize it. And so that's where my background as well in operations comes into handy. That's interesting because certainly in the UK there's been a lot of research on certain areas around the space.
not really had a practical application and not being able to inform things. It just seems to have been research for doing research sake and it's kind of, you're a dead end straight away. So it's almost like it may have been a waste of an opportunity for funding when it could have been something that you can actually utilize in the day -to -day operation and stuff. And I do think too that a lot of the research is focused around problem gambling. And so, you know, responsible gaming programs are prevention programs. And so the intent of responsible gaming programs
is to prevent problems from developing and the target audience is the entire player base. But what we've seen is because they're so associated with problem gambling and problem gambling programs, that customers tend to ignore them because they think that's a problem gambling program, that's not for me, so they don't engage in them. And I think part of that is, we're focusing on problem gambling and then trying to back into how do you create prevention programs. So that's where a lot of the research is focused. What I would like to see
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is responsible gaming focused research. So why aren't we talking to guests that don't develop problems, those that play in a way that's fun and entertaining and within their means, and then design responsible gaming and prevention programs around them because maybe they have protective factors, maybe there's messages that are resonating with them, but because we're not doing research with that group, we're not getting that information. So that's really where I'd like to change the focus to really inform these programs from a prevention perspective.
That makes total sense. One of the other five pillars that you mentioned earlier that really stood out to me as something offering something different compared to, should we say what, other organizations of this type have in the past is the independent data clearinghouse. You know, and just wondering...
Are you at the stage where you can tell us a bit more how that will operate, or is that, at this early stage, is it still kind of an aspiration? It's still a development stage, but we're moving rather quickly. I've had the benefit in my career to have created technology before. So, we're fleshing out a lot of details, but we see it as an iterative process. We know we can get short -term steps, and then we know what sort of our long -term vision is. So initially, the overall idea is we want to be able to share information.
amongst operators in order to better protect customers. So what that looks like and how we're defining that as we move forward will change. But initially think of universal self -exclusion across all of the operators across all jurisdictions. There's a lot of hurdles to jump through to get there, not only from a technology perspective, but from a confidentiality perspective, from data protection, all of the anti -trust. There's a lot of issues, but I think we can work through that and really
have that come out first with the ultimate goal of identification of risk.
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and sharing that type of information across operators. So again, we can better engage with guests to try to either motivate behavioral change as a preventive mechanism, or if an action needs to be taken because of the risk, then all operators are aware of this and they're all talking to each other. So that's the ultimate goal. I mean, is there also a bit of a mindset thing around that? Because certainly, bookies in the past and gambling operators in the past have been very wary of sharing information on their customers, they're very protective of, in case.
in case they're a good customer, not necessarily wanting to pass them on. So I'm assuming that there's a bit of an educational process from the operator side of things as well. Correct. Fortunately, responsible gaming is an area where they're not as competitive against each other. This is where they all have the same goal and outcome. They want to protect guests, they want the SOL being, they want the sustainability of the guests and the industry itself. And they know that to do that, it's better to share information
come together to do that. So there will be hurdles or there's still an education around that, but I think from what we're trying to do, they all understand that and embrace that. So we have a better path to get there than if it was a marketing initiative.
sort of thing so again is educational both ways and then obviously to the regulators as well as what you're doing so it's a yeah I think that that will be a big project for you guys but again one that's really interesting that I think will as a good opportunity really make it just yeah it's a good one
Obviously you've got some international operators in your membership. What cues and what inspiration have you taken from other markets where they've had similar initiatives, some have been successful, some less so. Just wondered if you managed to have a look at what's worked and you've been able to cherry pick some of the better ideas. Yeah, and I think we benefit from looking at what's been tried in other markets and learning from what were the successes, what were the failures.
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and trying to work around that. The US is a unique market, but I do think we can learn from international jurisdictions, from a policy perspective, from an education perspective. But we are, the US has been doing responsible gaming for a long time. I've been in the role 25 years, and it's an area that the industry has embraced. Some markets, that hasn't always been the case. So there's been actions taken.
regulatory level that had to have been taken because the industry wasn't willing to do it. So I think we're in a better place to start, but definitely we can learn from even the technology that's been tried or the partnerships that have been tried of how to do this and learn. With it being state run, you've got a lot of regulators to communicate with. How receptive have they been to this initiative? Very receptive. They're very excited about it. I think when we announced we got a lot of people excited reaching out.
and thought this was a good thing to do. There's been some questions around it as well, the intent, but I think once we start moving forward with initiatives that people understand. People are suspicious all the time. They really are. There's too many people thinking there's something nefarious going on when you're actually trying to tackle something tricky. But no, it's the most regulated perspective makes their life easier.
having one person to speak to rather than several different companies to try and ruin you all together. I mean with regards to that you say you've got 85 % of the market covered obviously you want to try and raise the standards across the industry so how are you going to...
So I've encouraged the other 15%, shall we say, to follow your lead. And I think that's really about collaboration as well across other organizations that do responsible gaming. And historically, I've worked with a lot of organizations that I really believe in collaboration. And as we did when I was at Caesar, we sort of set a standard that was higher than anything that was being done in the industry, higher than anything that was being regulated into the industry.
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that's now commonplace. So a lot of what's done today as responsible gaming initiatives is things that we did as first and I think that's the same thing that's going to happen here with ROGA is we will look at best practices and create those not only to raise the standards for our operators but across the industry and over time I think that that will happen. I mean with regards to that, is there, has there been conversations about even increasing the membership or is it more of a case of
seen how well you do, how effective you can be in that short period of time, then you've got a more compelling argument for people to join in, I guess. There's been a lot of interest of joining and how people can become associated with the organization. I do think we're in a focus right now on getting some of these initiatives to move forward. We have quite a few that we're very optimistic to move forward quickly. But we are interested in increasing the membership and we've had a lot of interest.
already so I feel in short time we'll also start adding to the membership. Well it's a very important area that you're working in Jen and wish you the best of luck. Thank you so much and thanks for having me.