New research using open banking data suggests the trigger point for financial risk assessments may be catching too many low-risk gamblers.
The research concluded that the UK’s £150 net-deposit threshold for online gambling financial vulnerability checks places significantly more weight on harm prevention than on protecting the freedoms of consumers who gamble safely.
The study, published in the journal Addiction, was carried out by researchers Robert Heirene from the University of Sydney, and Philip Newall from the University of Bristol.
It reanalysed open banking data from 424 UK gamblers, combining their transaction records with self-reported Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI) scores to simulate the real-world impact of the Gambling Commission’s financial vulnerability check regime.
The findings showed that over a 12-month period, roughly two-thirds of at-risk gamblers and nearly half of those considered low- or no-risk crossed the £150 threshold at least once, suggesting the current trigger point captures a substantial proportion of people not experiencing significant gambling harm.
Heirene wrote on LinkedIn: “Overall, the £150 value is probably defensible, but it does seem to land more on the side of harm reduction (i.e. identifying as many potentially at-risk consumers as possible) than what we’ve called ‘liberty preservation’ (i.e. not bothering people gambling without issue).
“This might be a good thing – a harm minimisation strategy probably should prioritise harm reduction! But one of the key purposes of our article is to highlight the trade-off here. These checks are unlikely to be cost-free from any perspective.”
What the numbers showed
The researchers found the threshold’s area under the curve came in at 0.66, indicating only a fair level of discrimination between at-risk and lower-risk consumers.
They calculated that a slightly higher threshold of around £187 would provide a marginally better balance between the two policy goals, though £150 remained within the statistical range of acceptable values.
The paper also found that thresholds based on spending across all operators performed better at identifying at-risk consumers than the single-operator approach currently used in the UK, though the authors noted the difference was not large and that further research would be needed to confirm its value.
In line with the approach taken in the Netherlands, the study found evidence that lower thresholds may be appropriate for younger adults.
Optimal threshold values in the sample were generally lower for those under 30 than for older gamblers, consistent with existing evidence that younger people face a higher risk of gambling-related harm.
The researchers also noted that a previous analysis of the same dataset had suggested the UK’s affordability checks should rarely affect people who are not experiencing gambling-related harm – a conclusion this study’s more detailed threshold modelling complicated.
The authors were clear about the limitations of their work and clarified that their specific threshold estimates should be treated as provisional.
Their sample was not representative of the broader UK gambling population, having been recruited via the crowdsourcing platform Prolific, and they noted that voluntary participants in gambling surveys tend to be older and more heavily involved bettors.
The paper called on policymakers to fuse larger and more representative open banking datasets with self-reported harm scores, pointing to the Gambling Commission’s Gambling Survey for Great Britain – which runs at around 20,000 participants – as a potential vehicle for more robust future analysis.
