The hidden threat to personal management licences

At a recent affiliate industry event in London, I was chatting to various igaming operators about the state of compliance within affiliate marketing. There seems to have been a notable shift in the past six to 12 months in terms of the perceived risk, with compliance personnel generally feeling more relaxed about the threat to their businesses.

On one hand, there are clearly some good reasons for this, but I had one particularly worrying conversation that were I a Personal Management Licence holder (PML) within that business it would have had me more than a little concerned. But more on that in a moment.

Most of the operations my team spoke to at LAC now deploy at least one of the popular affiliate compliance tools in the workplace, whether it be wag.io, GiG or Rightlander. Not too surprisingly, these operators now generally have a dedicated compliance department or a compliance officer within the marketing team to handle this task and these officers mostly seem to have a settled routine for monitoring affiliate compliance and have built it into their routines.

That doesn’t mean that there isn’t still some confusion over interpreting the guidelines, especially in countries where marketing compliance guidelines are evolving such as the particularly turbulent Spanish and German markets. But lessons learned from the UK and Sweden are helping operators to prepare for the future and, in general, those I spoke to with settled routines were more comfortable with this aspect of their work than they were when I was having similar conversations this time last year.

Which brings me back to the one worrying conversation I referenced above. I asked one senior affiliate manager with an established UK-facing operator (managing more than 10 brands) what procedures they now used for monitoring affiliate compliance and was told that they get a junior member of staff to search Google. Initially I thought the manager involved had misunderstood the question but as the conversation evolved, it became clear there was no budget allocated for affiliate compliance, clearly no directives from above and an apparent lack of understanding as to what guidelines needed to be heeded.
Not worth the risk
Even allowing for the fact that there may be a separate compliance team with a remit for this task (which wasn’t mentioned), I know from experience that there has to be a line of communication between the two to ensure that affiliates understand what is required of them and to ensure the operating licence is not put at risk. And surely a good PML would and should ensure that compliance guidelines are fully appreciated throughout the company.

This lack of understanding at the marketing level is thankfully now unusual but the fact that it still exists is surprising to me and I wonder if the business fully appreciates the risk? That said, is there an underlying feeling of complacency developing, perhaps caused by the lack of obvious penalties related to marketing in certain territories?

After all, while there have been significant fines levied on operators, it’s often AML or player protection issues that are quoted as the reason and rarely do you see a massive fine levied on a company for the action of an affiliate. Indeed, over the past two years most affiliates have woken up to the need for compliance and overall, they much better understand the obligation.

But then again, you see something like the “self-exclusion” issue (still ongoing in the UK and Sweden) where at least one affiliate is trying to entice self-excluded players to find other ways to gamble and if you are a PML, you’re not going to want even the slightest exposure to that, especially as it is already on the UKGC’s radar.

The bottom line is that some businesses are still taking a big risk. We haven’t seen an operator lose their licence over affiliate compliance yet in the UK but it’s an inevitability that someone, sometime, somewhere in the world is going to wake up to bad news one day.

Ian Sims is the founder of Rightlander, a state-of-the-art affiliate compliance platform that allows affiliates and operators to identify potentially non-compliant content in regulated jurisdictions. Prior to establishing Rightlander, Sims was an egaming affiliate for 13 years.