August 6, 2024 2g3e13
Last week, iGaming Ontario announced the selection of the t bid from IC360 and IXUP to develop a new self-exclusion system to be used across all iGO licensed sites and OLG's online gaming platform. The value of the 5-year contract is worth $9.5 million, and the system will be the first of its kind in North America.
"We look forward to working with IC360, IXUP, OLG and our operators to develop a centralized self-exclusion program for Ontario’s igaming players," said Martha Otton, iGaming Ontario Executive Director. "This project reflects our ongoing commitment to build on the existing player protections here in Ontario. With IC360’s tech-first expertise in betting integrity through ProhiBet and IXUP’s demonstrated success with BetStop in Australia, we’re confident they will help us build a robust self-exclusion system for Ontarians who decide to take a short- or long-term break from gambling.”
Once developed, every time any customer within Ontario looks to to, or at a given licensed provider, the details will be measured against the self-exclusion registry. If the details entered match the details of an excluded individual, access to new registration or the existing will be denied, as per their wishes.
Within the Australian regime, licensed operators post a rotating selection of Responsible Gambling taglines at the base of their site, meant to get customers to really think about whether or not they want to gamble, like "What's gambling really costing you?" or "Chances are, you're about to lose". Near this are toll-free gambling help lines and links to local responsible gambling resources. More prominently, in the same area at the bottom of any page, is the logo for "BetStop: The Self-Exclusion ".
Clicking that logo will take s to the BetStop site, where in about 5 minutes, s can for the service, to take some period of break from online gambling. As of August 2024, roughly 26,000 Australians have ed to self-exclude from legal online gambling. With a population of 26 million, this is a relatively small number of people, at about one-tenth of one per cent.
No, Ontario should achieve a considerably higher rate of self-exclusion versus the population, compared to Australia and here's why: It is crucial to note that within Australia, only online racing and sports betting is legally available. There is no access to legal online or live dealer casino games, bingo, or poker. These are banned in Australia. As we've seen within the latest Ontario market results, the vast majority of gaming activity comes within the online casino gaming vertical. (84% of wagers in Ontario's most recent quarter came via online casinos.)
People that might otherwise be interested in that vertical in Australia, have no access, thus need not look to self-exclude. In other words, having just one gaming vertical assuredly skews Australian exclusion rates to be lower than jurisdictions that offer all major verticals. So while this Ontario vendor selection news gives us a clue as to how their self-exclusion solution might take shape, we must look to other national markets that offer all the same verticals that Ontario offers, to see how the self-exclusion numbers might stack up.
For the most appropriate examples for potential comparison of self-exclusion figures, we need to find markets that offer the same gaming verticals that are available in Ontario. While we'd love to think that Ontario could see results as successful as those in Sweden, Ontario will likely see numbers that more closely resemble those in Denmark, in of the relative rates of self-exclusion.
Sweden is the Gold Standard of self-exclusion solutions. Given that identifying igaming customers is down to the use of the standardized "BankID", it is nearly impossible for self-excluded customers to "fall through the cracks" of the system. For example, in Ontario, will a customer be able to self-exclude, but then still somehow find a way to circumvent that exclusion, with some manner of alternate personal details?
What if they have access to another "home address" or another mobile phone number, email or payment method" the Ontario system can be.
Furthermore, since the Swedish system is truly unified, the interface for exclusion was able to be directly integrated across the top of every gambling site and app, so that any player in crisis or otherwise, has direct and obvious access in order to avoid harm. In other words, the Swedish system makes harm reduction tools very easy to see and implement. With a few taps or clicks, a Swedish can be excluded across all licensed brands within the regime. The need not jump through the hoop of navigating away from the gaming site to create a separate self-exclusion profile. If the has already created a player , the system has all it needs to implement the self-exclusion. As a result of this elegant solution, as of writing, nearly 114,000 people in Sweden had self-excluded. With a population of 10.5 million, that's about a 1.1% rate of self-exclusion.
The reality is that Ontario will most likely resemble Denmark in of its self-exclusion rate. Like Ontario and Sweden, Denmark offers the same wide array of licensed online gaming types. Denmark however has a self-exclusion system that very much resembles the Australian BetStop system, with logos and referring links at the bottom of each page. Once s navigate away, they can create their self-exclusion registration. In April 2024, the Danish regulator announced that 50,000 people had self-excluded. With a population of 5.9 million, the rate of self-exclusion is 0.84%.
When iGaming Ontario first launched, each operator was mandated to have the official iGaming Ontario logo displayed at the top of each site. The logo was meant to be visible to customers immediately, without having to scroll to the bottom of the page, so that players could see they were playing on an official site. This is no longer in force across iGO sites, as you may now find these logos in most site footers (bottom).
Taking up space near the top of any app or site page is a nuisance for many reasons. It takes up valuable space from both a marketing and experience perspective and its mandate creates a design quirk that differs from designs used in other geographies by each given operator. While we'd love for iGaming Ontario to push for exclusion messaging displayed up top as in Sweden, we know all licensed iGO providers will likely argue against it. Given these brands operate their platforms across jurisdictions, unique market complications are just that, complicated and thus costly. Minimizing structural site differences is preferred. Thus, we would recommend the following, easy-to-implement, but still effective solution.
Currently in Ontario, upon every session , a is asked to confirm if they are "Fit for play". In other words "You're not in crisis right now, right?" Confirming this kind of message currently is almost too simple. How many people click to confirm, just to move on, even if they're not actually fit to play? Sure, the popup begs the question, but does it offer an alternative solution?
In its current format, this popup message box does more to alleviate liability for iGO and their providers than it does to help prevent harms. After the fact, iGO can always say: "Hey, you clicked to confirm that you were OK to play and potentially lose all that money. There's no coming back to us after you lost it, saying you were actually in crisis."
In addition to that existing message which asks about player fitness, at that same moment during the journey, we recommend that iGO mandate the display of self-exclusion system logos that can link s directly away to the new self-exclusion registry system. This simple solution would introduce no new hurdles or annoyances to players, make no drastic site or application alterations in design, but would be far more helpful to those that might actually need assistance in a crucial moment.
Having self-exclusion resources in the footer of each site should be a given, but when a person is feeling an unhealthy urge to chase losses for example, providing the actual resource to prevent harm in that same moment should be all the more powerful.
While in time, we would expect the Danish self-exclusion rate to increase, thus increasing our baseline for projections here, we simply want to use the already-demonstrated rate from the most apt market comparison for iGaming Ontario. Based on the 0.84% rate of self-exclusion rate in Denmark, in time, Ontario could thus see in the region of 131,000 self-excluded individuals. That's about the population of the City of Kingston, made safer. When you combine this with the fact that many formerly "grey market" operators have stopped serving Ontario, regulation is proving to have real teeth in of preventing harm.
Other Canadian provinces also promote their own self-exclusion platforms, but those solutions work solely on the government lottery-run sites, while the comparatively huge "grey market" of online gambling options lie outside the platforms for self-exclusion.
If other Canadian provinces moved to create their own versions of iGaming Ontario, they would vastly reduce the "offshore" gambling options, while hugely increasing the number of popular brands that would fall under the self-exclusion system. That's far, far safer than the current situation, yet only Ontario and Alberta are being proactive in this regard.
At the same assumed self-exclusion rate of 0.84%, Quebec could see in the region of 74,000 people that make themselves far safer from harm, while British Columbia could see in the region of 46,000 made safer. Compare this to the current self-exclusion system in BC, that sees just about 2,500 active self-exclusions per month, which only apply to PlayNow.com and physical BC gaming locations.
Potential number of Canadians self-excluding by province based on Denmark rate of 0.84% 6ts5c |
| Prov. | 2023 Pop. | Potential Exclusions |
| NL | 538,605 | 4,524 |
| PE | 173,787 | 1,460 |
| NS | 1,058,694 | 8,893 |
| NB | 834,691 | 7,011 |
| QC | 8,874,683 | 74,547 |
| ON | 15,610,000 | 131,124 |
| MB | 1,454,902 | 12,221 |
| SK | 1,209,107 | 10,156 |
| AB | 4,695,290 | 39,440 |
| BC | 5,519,013 | 46,360 |
What good are those kinds of self-exclusions, given the vast number of online gaming options at hand, be they defined as "illegal" or "grey market"? However one defines them, the current self-exclusion efforts outside Ontario (& eventually Alberta) will continue to be totally ineffectual.
Will provincial governments outside Ontario and Alberta ever become pragmatic about the current state of things, taking steps to make the vulnerable more safe, while increasing their own revenues"?
An immense amount of recent evidence, provided by the Attorney General of British Columbia to the Court of Appeal for Ontario regarding a matter over "international play" within an online lottery scheme, indicates that BC is interested in the latter.
Their evidence highlighted the "virtues" of BC's current PlayNow.com-only self-exclusion system. It also railed against the "illegal operators", an issue that has now been exacerbated for BC by the marketing efforts that arose across the country as a result of the newly legal Ontario market, which has brands that also serve BC from "international" jurisdictions, offshore.
Such evidence indicates that BC (and likely other like-minded provinces), for the foreseeable future, will refuse to come to grips with realities with which they are faced - and that's what's actually criminal.
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