Tim Miller, Executive Director of Research and Policy at Britain’s Gambling Commission, has broken the secrecy seal around how it will roughly spend £26m as it seeks to contain the illegal gambling.
The Commission received the additional funding back in November when the UK’s Autumn Budget was announced. Aside from the subsequent creation of the Illegal Gambling Taskforce, there was little to no insight on how the rest of the extra budget will be utilised.
Miller has now offered SBC News exclusive info on the above, although still remaining somewhat laconic given that criminals might be watching and trying to anticipate the gambling authority’s next move.
“I don’t know how many listeners you have in Moscow but if there are any out there I’m not telling you how we’re doing this,” Miller exclaimed on the iGaming Daily podcast.
The Commission’s top researcher still outlined two key spending priorities – more manpower and more technology.
“The first area that we’re going to focus on first is around people. We’ve actually already started that with new folks joining our legal markets team just in the last ten days, and what that will allow us to do is to kind of ramp up some of our enforcement action. We’ll be able to issue more cease and desist, we’ll be able to disrupt websites.
“So frankly, having those bums on seats is a really important part of it. It also means that we’re able to bring in new skills as well. As a public body, we are competing for those sort of skills against people that have got a lot more money than us. So a bit of additional funding will help us bring in some of the skills that we need.”
Next comes technology, which not surprisingly at all is a crucial cog in the fight against illegal operators.
“We deploy a lot of technology in this space already. It’s almost frustrating that you can’t talk about the details because what our illegal markets team does can blow your mind.
“But the technology is improving all the time. So I think the opportunity for us to be able to invest in other technologies that will help us identify and remove these illegal sites will be another important part of the investment that we’ve got there. So I think those will be the two main areas of our focus.”
Lastly, in addition to the above and the critiques towards Big Tech that Miller made on the podcast, what was also interesting to hear was a Commission official’s view on crypto regulation from the perspective of the regulated gambling industry.
Miller added that innovation in the crypto space is something he believes the licensed market can benefit from. “It may well play a role in stopping some people drifting to the illegal market,” he noted, highlighting that the Commission’s research shows that ‘crypto’ is the second most used term in online searches for illegal gambling operators.
“We are working with our industry forum and others to look at what is the route that we can take to open up the opportunities for licensed operators to make more use of crypto. There’s no ban on it but I think it would be challenging at the moment for an operator to show that they could accept crypto and still be compliant.
“Now, certainly the work that other regulators are doing, most notably the Financial Conduct Authority, will have set out their pathway for some form of regulation over elements of crypto.
“We didn’t want to be kind of the first ones in the UK as a regulator to jump into the crypto space. We certainly didn’t want to get ahead of the financial regulator, but certainly I can see opportunities for license operators here to be able to make use of crypto as a method of consumer deposits in the not too distant future.”
