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The attention we received from the Guardian's journalist was really more targeted at raising concerns about the rigor of the OHID application process. On Friday's show, we discussed the new system for the funding of gambling harm research, education and treatment in the UK following the closure of GambleAware and the centralised system under NHS England, UK Research and Innovation and the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities. 33 organisations have secured a share of £25 million made available by OHID for RET services. And on Friday's show, we said that we would endeavour to speak to somebody involved in that process. welcome back to iGaming Daily, supported by OptiMove, the creator of positionalist marketing and the number one player engagement solution for iGaming and sports betting operators. I'm Charlie Horner, and today I'm delighted to say that we have managed to get somebody involved in the process up. We're joined by Duncan Garvey, CEO of BetBlocker. which has secured just over a million pounds of funding from OHID. Duncan, thank you ever so much for joining us. How are you doing? Thanks very much, Charlie. It's wonderful to be here. I'm doing really well. I mean, we've had good news and we can continue to advance the project, which is really the priority for us at the moment. brilliant. And I'm also joined by iGame and expert editor, Joe Streeter. it's good to uh carry on this conversation that we had on Friday, isn't it? Yeah, it is. felt like it didn't feel like a closed chapter on Friday when we finished this conversation, Charlie. So it's good to keep it going. It's good to keep this story going. A really important time for safer gambling in the UK at the moment. yeah, really, really some good insights coming up, I'm sure. Yeah, absolutely. I'm sure there is. So we should say Duncan, congratulations on securing the funding. I'm sure it's been a long and busy process and we'd love to just dig into the inner workings of that process. Could you outline to listen to some of the requirements that you've had to demonstrate and how you've had to evidence that over the last few months? Yeah, certainly. I mean, it's been a very long and deep process. I mean, I certainly won't... take credit for all of the work myself. Other team members like Pedro Romero and Monique of Chafique made putting a lot of time and work, blood, sweat and tears into our application to ensure it had the best chance possible. The process is understandably quite rigorous. um It involved, as I said, investing a lot of time into evidencing everything that we were saying. We had to demonstrate the maturity of the project and the ability of Betblocker to um support the additional workload that this sort of funding would create. We had to evidence the effectiveness of the service that we provide. But I mean, critically for Betblocker, had to evidence our independence from industry influence. Now, that's a uh really critical point here. And this was the biggest challenge Betblocker faced going into this application. Betblocker is an international um organization. We provide support to users all over the world. The UK is a very important uh market for us and it certainly is where we were founded. It's our birthplace. uh But it actually represents only about 6 % of our users overall. That means that while we were happy to engage with the funding system in the UK, we still need to be able to find funds to support the other 94 % of our users outside of the UK. And it's great that the UK system has matured to a place where it can create a funding system that is independent from the industry directly. But outside of the UK, those funding systems just do not exist yet. It's that simple. And so we had to spend a lot of time effectively building out a roadmap to how we would move to a place where we can operate without industry funding. And that's going to require huge organizational changes. We've already agreed that a couple of our board of trustees will step down. We will be separating into two separate organizations. We will have the UK organization that will solely provide support to the UK. And we will have our international organization that will deal with support for everywhere else in the world. So we've had to make some significant changes to meet those standards. And that's both a challenge and a benefit. There are positives and negatives to that process. But yeah, this is where we had to spend a lot of our time and work and focus to get through the application process. Interesting Duncan. Yeah, it's quite a lot. um you mentioned the kind of rigorous nature of the process, all the things you've had to go through. um A fantastic team you do have at BetBlocker. can account for that. um I know, you know, I know we speak about safer gambling quite a lot. I know you're somebody that's not just invested in BetBlocker succeeding. You're invested in safer gambling succeeding and a safer gambling ecosystem. Has going through this rigorous process given you optimism for the future of safer gambling in the UK or has it kind of left you with a bit of fear over the bureaucracy involved? I'm principally an optimist, Joe. I don't view this particular process to strongly evidence a specific trend. As a sector, as with all human endeavour, we learn and we grow and we improve. And the politics surrounding harm minimisation in the UK just now are a temporary thing. Because we will grow, we will learn, we will improve. That is so much bigger than any political agenda at this moment. And that's not to say that I think that the political conditions right now are not good. I think we can achieve a lot of good. um Could we do it faster? Could we do it more effectively and better? Yes, I think we could. But that's the same for everything in life. um If we could focus more on reasoned dialogue. across the partisan spectrum and talking to each other and finding common ground we would be far, far more effective. But regardless, we will move in a positive direction. It's great to hear that there's positive signs, even though we would all like to see an ecosystem where people can have dialogue across the political spectrum. in these polarizing times, that seems like a particularly far fetch. But I'd love to dive into the future of these next two years, now you've managed to secure this funding, the first round from OHID. Obviously you've taken over now as CEO of Betblocker on a full-time basis and you have this funding from OHID. What plans do you have over the next two years and how much does this two-year funding help you continue to expand the support that you can provide in the UK? think we need to be clear. mean, I know that the funding award sounds like a lot when it's set at a million pounds. But that's split over two years. So it's actually only 500,000 pounds a year. And we then need to highlight that to meet OHAD's independence criteria, we're having to, as I mentioned previously, split into two separate organizations. This basically duplicates the work. We're going to have to run parallel teams. We're going to have to code the app twice. There's a lot that we have to do structurally to evidence that the UK service is free of industry and of influence. Now, that means it's more expensive to deliver the UK support than it is for us to deliver support in the rest of the world. Betblocker is a strange kind of model where we're either funded well enough where we can support everybody or were not funded well enough to support anybody. So we need to have that reach that once we reach that funding threshold, it's all good. And what the international model benefits from is everybody can contribute to reaching that threshold. When we divide off and provide service solely for the UK, it's only the UK that's contributing to reaching that threshold. So it's It's a more expensive model that the UK has looked to deploy. But to counter that, I like to describe myself as a professional fence-sitter. To counter that, the other side of that equation is that it may well be worth it to spend that additional money if it improves consumer confidence in the support we're delivering. So while it is more it is unarguably more expensive for the uk if if um a higher number of of of vulnerable people will engage with the support because they trust it more That that that seems like a good trade-off to me So yeah the the figures to my mind and having having overseen all the finances of betblocker Historically, the figures are are big But once you factor in having to set up this this entirely independent second service, lot of that extra money, what looks like extra money isn't extra at all. It's eaten by the additional expense. That said, all of that said, that doesn't mean mean that we won't expand the service in the UK. We. We are now funded well enough that we can support as many people as the UK can send to us for help via whatever channels those requests come through. Right now we're on target to increase the number of people who accessed our support in the UK by over 50 % in 2026 compared to 2025. So we're talking about moving from about 22,000 last year to well over 30,000 this year. We will continue to roll out languages, translations of the product as quickly as we can to support minority communities. We will have developers dedicated just to the UK that will help us develop new features um to better support users. So we do have a lot of plans. I'm simply trying to put in context that the money isn't actually as much as it sounds. No, that makes sense. yeah, the scale of what you have to do really, it's hard to put into context, but there is a lot you have to do. um But your expansion, you kind of expanding your support, it comes at a really crucial time because we've seen um as a result of this transition process to a new era of funding, we've seen some big and some pioneering, I would say, players. drop out the game, notably GambleAware. Yeah, how much of a loss is that to the sector? And also, how confident are you, not that you can replace GambleAware, obviously, but that you can kind of plug some of the gaps that are going to be left for the support system that they provided for so many years? This is a delicate topic. Talking about GambleAware specifically, GambleAware had a profound influence over the harm minimization space in the UK. And while I've always been very positive and supportive about their role, I would stress that there was plenty of criticism about GambleAware when they were effectively undertaking the work of the funding commissioner. The three new funding commissioners in the UK, while Gambler were shutting down, they weren't a direct front-line support provider by and large. Their principal job was overseeing the distribution of REt funding. And the three new funding commissioners are stepping into that role. So it's not like that is disappearing. It's just new organizations are taking over that job. That may result in uh re-prioritization, a changing of what's considered priorities for the system. And any change is going to result in some natural criticism. cannot be the funding commissioner and say yes to everybody. It doesn't work like that. you're always going to naturally draw criticism from those that feel that the system didn't support. So I'm pragmatic about my views on overhead and the NHS. um I understand they will be subjected to scrutiny because of their decision making. and I'm open to allowing them the space to try and grow and build a better system as they see it. That's not to say, however, that I don't understand the frustration and deep anger that's felt by some really important contributors to the space who have not been successful in their applications. There are numerous organizations that I could point to where I know the people running them quite well. I have great respect for them and for the work that they've undertaken and I don't know how we've got to a place where they weren't funded. I'm not willing to go out as far as saying that the decisions weren't um appropriate. I wasn't on the inside. I don't know what the process were that reached those. But I can see that the loss of those organizations is going to be felt on the front line. Yeah, definitely. And when you are dealing with budgets that are capped, there are always going to be people who miss out and that naturally will lead to anger and scrutiny. then we'll take a quick break, Duncan and Joe, and we'll come back and we'll dive into this a little bit more because this is a really interesting aspect of the story. Welcome back to iGaming Daily. Duncan, before the break, sort of... referred to some of the maybe anger and scrutiny that might come from this process. And Bet Blocker, we should say, were the first organization to sort of be confirmed as part of this process. Now, I don't think that was necessarily as planned, was it? It came from sort of intensified scrutiny from journalists. Why do you think Bet Blocker has faced this sort of scrutiny from reporters as opposed to OHID or the process itself? I'm quite honest with you, Charlie, I don't really feel it was Bet Blocker that was being scrutinized there. I think that the attention we received from the Guardian's journalist was really more targeted at raising concerns about the rigor of the OHID application process and it was rooted in what they felt were disparities in the stated priorities of OHAD and Betblocker's model, specifically industry independence, as we discussed at the top of this podcast. The scrutiny was really rooted in implications being made based on a lack of knowledge of what's actually been going on. And that, I mean, from our perspective, the best solution to that was to simply be open, honest and transparent about the process and what we had had to do to get approval. was, was... Sunlight's the best disinfectant. If you simply fill in the information gap, then assumptions and implications no longer really have room to take root. But all of it, to my mind, was really more about looking to question the integrity of OHID's process more than it was really about criticizing BetBlocker. And. We were just a useful tool to uh advance that story, advance that line of questioning. And the truth is, as I was saying, once you actually look at the changes we had to agree to, to get through the application process, the questions, while legitimate, if you don't know the details of the application process, the questions are very quickly answered. Yeah, Duncan, I was going to ask you if you kind of had any regrets and I absolutely do not think you should about the way you kind of responded to that, I can tell from your answer that you don't. uh And I wholeheartedly agree with... Oh, go on, I'll let you come in. look, I definitely have regrets. don't... That's not how I would prefer to have dealt with that situation. Okay. It's not who I... who I, how I like to conduct myself ordinarily and it's not how Bet Blocker would prefer to present itself. uh But we do understand there's a limitation to print journalism. And where I would provide a two and a half thousand word response, really going into the details of the answers for each question. If we were lucky, only 10 % of that was going to make it into the final article. So it just seemed better for us to publish a response rather than provide it to the journalist and only see parts of that reflected in the finished article. I did not enjoy that. That was not a moment that I will reflect on positively in the future. Yeah. And I know you've said you didn't enjoy it. It's not something you of thrived on at all. But just for a little bit of context, so just give our listeners a little bit of context of what actually happened there because we're talking a little bit vague. So just don't want them to be Yeah, no problem. No problem. We were contacted by Rob Davies at The Guardian with a list of questions and a very short deadline to offer a response. The language of the questions very much reflected a position of. critical attitude towards why we would be funded in the first place when there were other blocking software providers on the market that could have been funded. I personally felt that the only way for Betblocker to get a fair accounting of the, within the nature of these questions was to just answer everything I could publicly and transparently. Yep. Yep. I, know, I have to agree. I think that was a good way for you to kind of put your point across and make sure that it wasn't kind of, uh, yeah, taken in any, in, in any other way. Uh, but the Duncan on that point, actually, there are some, uh, there are some, market is strong for bet blocking apps for bet blocking software. Bet blocker, undoubtedly one of the strongest in the market. don't know the intricacies of you who sits where on the league table. But yeah, why do you think BetBlocker was chosen as the kind of bet blocking software app? I mean, you say the market is strong, I would say there's two to three um real players within the blocking software space. I certainly don't want to think about it as a league table. No, sorry. We're all trying to help. reduce harm. So I like to try and view it as friendly and supportive rather than competitive. But I mean when it comes to the application process in OHID. This was a VCSE voluntary community and social enterprises fund. Now, Betblocker is the only blocking software that operates as a charity. The other blocking software on the market are commercial businesses and as commercial businesses they don't fall into that VCSE categorization. So as far as the O-Head application process went, we were really the only blocking software that could apply for funding. But setting that aside, as a charity, we tend to engender greater levels of public confidence from the outset. That model encourages a higher level of trust from users. Because we are free to everybody all the time and we offer our service anonymously, um we see higher levels of user engagement. you look at where commercial blocking softwares are engaged to deliver free support, they need to give out license codes to allow users to activate to get to the support. That's a delay in the process and for somebody who is in a window of crisis with gambling, if they calm down, they often become apathetic about getting support. So any delay to the process can stop them actually moving forward and reaching a safe, protected, blocked status. Because we are free to everybody all the time, there's no license codes, there's no activation. users can can move straight to from searching for blocking software for help to blocked immediately. In fact, our process can be completed in less than two minutes. So we see higher levels of user engagement. This is why we support huge numbers of users every year. And of course, there's cost effectiveness because we run as a charity. don't UBOs and and shareholders that are looking for us to return dividends to them, which means we can deliver the support at a lower cost. So there's lots of good reasons that the bet blocker was chosen and I'm very proud of the work we've done. Yeah, you should absolutely be proud and I know Charlie's going to come in with another question now, but I want to echo that point that uh removing the friction, any type of friction in those moments when a player seeks support is absolutely crucial. I just wanted to echo how pertinent a point that is. I'm glad you made it. definitely. Duncan, as we bring things towards a close, I know you said there that it's not a league table and things in this space should be friendly and supportive. I don't want to dwell on the negatives too much, but I think it's safe to say that there are people out there who are left unhappy by the result of the process, guess. But what would you say to those people in the third sector who might have concerns about the future of safer gambling in the UK, just as a riposte? I'm absolutely devastated. I've said publicly already that this has been a very bitter streak for weeks for us. Look, we're thrilled to get that certainty and that security of funding. but I've watched so many peers, people I've learned from, people who have taught me in this space, organizations whose work I have thought really, really hard, highly of, getting really hard outcomes from this. uh I remain optimistic and I hope for the best for the future, but I'm not gonna say that that I don't feel that there's been some real blows to the support infrastructure with some of the funding decisions. My heart goes out to all of these organizations and if there's anything that I or Betblocker can do to support them in this tough period. I'm saying this to anyone listening, please just reach out to me. I don't know what we practically can do, but we're willing to try. I have no doubt that the new system will account for the needs of the end users and will ultimately, uh once the transition period is through, will ultimately work in the best interests of users. But in the interim, I think we... risk losing a lot of knowledge and expertise in the space. Yeah, absolutely. Duncan, look, we really appreciate your time, your expertise, and also your nuance to talk about some of these things. There are positives and negatives as well, and so we appreciate you dwelling on both that and including that nuance. So Duncan, again, thank you ever so much. Joe, thank you for joining me as well on this one. And to our listeners, Thank you once again for joining today's episode of iGaming Daily. Thanks to our sponsor Optimo for supporting the show and join us again tomorrow to keep up to date with all the latest global gambling news. you