European betting association gets vote of confidence from KPMG report
The European Gaming & Betting Association (EGBA) has received a positive report from KPMG with regards to the consumer protection services inside its jurisdiction. The report sought to investigate protections across online services, including gambling, offered by members of the EGBA.
KPMG sought to review member and non-member firms across key focus areas including data protection and safety. ©Sven Piper/Unsplash
In a statement released on the EGBA website on Thursday, the association said that KPMG had found members to have been offering “detailed consumer protection” with a particular focus on gambling safety and protection of sensitive data.
The report was commissioned by the EGBA themselves and involved the review of one gambling website each from the EGBA’s six member companies – Bet365, Betsson Group, Entertain, Flutter, Kindred, and William Hill. The investigation also ran across “one website in each jurisdiction” for social media, alcohol retail, and esports companies, among others for companies that were non-members.
All of these entities had their terms and conditions contracts reviewed as well, with focus areas like KYC, customer safety, data protection, anti-money laundering and advertising coming under the scanner. On all fronts, KPMG found that a majority of the websites offered extensive protection across these categories, with the odd website not meeting the gold standard. Although it is pertinent to note that the members weren’t reviewed in this particular report for their compliance with local statutory obligations.
Maarten Haijer, the secretary general of the EGBA, said that the purpose of commissioning this review was to see how the members line-up in comparison to the larger world of online services, and pointed out that the final report was encouraging to behold.
“We welcome the report and its findings, which offers a valuable barometer of the level of consumer protection offered by our members. The purpose of the report is to check how EGBA member companies sit within the bigger world of online services in terms of the consumer protections they offer. The findings clearly show that EGBA members have a high commitment to offering their customers a high standard of consumer protection.”
Details of the report
As mentioned previously, KPMG reviewed five key areas of focus. With the KYC services, the review involved how thoroughly the companies treat age and identity verification. Along similar lines, customer safety and data protection were reviewed for the transparency of information provided to customers regarding how they would be tracked, how their data would be stored and used, and the ease with which customers could get in touch with customer support.
In the case of anti-money laundering and advertising as well, the general philosophy of the review was centered around transparency and clear communication of agreements, crime prevention measures, and details on how to report suspicious activity.
All of these focus areas were reviewed across two jurisdictions, Denmark and the UK. The report found that a number of members had standard terms and conditions contracts across both these jurisdictions, albeit with country specific requirements written into the contracts wherever necessary. Only one member firm was deemed to have limited information about its advertising endeavors, and that was specifically on its Danish site. For the most part, the report said the findings were positive in nature.
“The majority of the Member Firms’ websites contained comprehensive and easily accessible information for users within their terms and conditions, providing detailed information in respect of the areas of focus. For one Member Firm potential customers had to first open an account with the company prior to being able to see their terms and conditions, which was an outlier within the industry; this was the same for the Danish and UK sites. Once the account was opened, however, the terms and conditions were easily accessible.”
EGBA’s focus on safety and cyber security
The report will have come as something of a relief for the EGBA, which has been pushing particularly hard in areas such as problem gambling and cyber security for the last year or so.
In March this year, the EGBA had announced its plans to counter cyber-attacks, which was to set up an expert group that would allow members – and non-member who desired it – to share information regarding cyber attacks in the online gaming world.
These plans had come in the wake of data that suggested that automated cyber-attacks were on the rise and had made up 28% of all traffic that gambling or betting sites received in 2020. In the same breath, it was also found that the deferred Euro 2020 football tournament, which took place in 2021, had seen an uptick of 96% year-on-year when it came to automated cyber attacks and illegal gambling.
