iGaming is a fiercely competitive industry for operators vying for revenue share and market leadership. But when it comes to safer gambling and player protection, it’s crucial to keep a shared goal in mind.

That was the core message of a panel at British Columbia Lottery Corporation (BCLC)’s New Horizons in Safer Gambling conference in October, when operators and regulators gathered to discuss the impacts of regulating gaming on responsible gambling, using Ontario’s commercial open market as a framing.

“Although we’re competing in a lot of ways, we all benefit from having healthy players,” said Ontario Lottery and Gaming (OLG) VP of Community, Sustainability & Social Responsibility, Catherine Meade. “We need to talk about what customer behaviours lead us to intervene and what thresholds we’re using.

“No one really benefits from passing a player from one to the next. Who benefits — and, more importantly, who’s harmed — when we do it without working together? Of course, the answer to the latter is the player.”

“No one really benefits from passing a player from one to the next.”

“We may be fierce competitors in the field of business, fighting every day for customers and market share and the profitability and sustainability of our business, but when it comes to responsible gambling, I think we can all agree we’re on the same team,” added BetMGM’s Director of Responsible Gambling, Richard Taylor.

Defining and measuring goals

While this panel took place in Vancouver, it centred largely on Ontario, given that the province conducts and operates the only regulated commercial iGaming market in the country.

A primary goal of opening Ontario’s doors and bringing online gaming under regulatory oversight was to bring the sizeable and mature grey market into the light so that players can be reached with safeguards and responsible gambling initiatives can be tracked.

“Regulating the industry at least provides the opportunity for those government goals and policies to reach the market,” noted Rush Street Interactive’s Managing Director of Canada, Bruce Caughill. “Otherwise, if you don’t regulate it, you have no opportunity.

“One of the biggest benefits of a regulated market is that the account-based requirement to participate means you know everybody and every transaction. You’re able to measure because you have that window… you’re able to touch those people in the unregulated market that were not otherwise touched from a responsible gaming perspective.”

Flutter’s Director of Business Integrity and Financial Crime Risk, Hodan Fourie, added that the biggest risk to customers is the potential of winding up playing on an unregulated site. There, often, there is a stark lack of safeguards and accountability.

Accountability is an important word here. As Taylor noted, while regulation itself can be a driver of competitive innovation, a good gaming regulator holds its operators accountable so that all are held to the same standards around player protection.

A good regulator draws from operators

To that end, the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO)’s regulatory standards and iGaming Ontario (iGO)’s requirements stipulate several things, such as how celebrities and influencers can be used in marketing. Ontario also requires its licensed operators to spend a certain percentage of their gross gaming revenue on responsible gambling messaging.

Those requirements didn’t come around by accident, explained the panelists. They were the result of consultation with operators and, in many cases, a painstaking iterative process of application.

“In some jurisdictions, it can be ‘take it or leave it’ or actually just ‘take it, this is what you get,’” noted Taylor. “But there needs to be a level of trust between operators and regulators. Allow us to dazzle you and surprise you, because you may see something that is surprising and that might become a standard down the road.”

Certainly, in Ontario, the conduct-and-manage entity iGO knew that in order to run the provincial gaming market to the best of its ability, it needed to draw upon operators’ expertise.

“We know that operators know their players much better than we do in the government world,” acknowledged iGO’s Director of Industry Programs and Monitoring, Catherine Jarmain. “So, we know we really need to do some serious listening to understand how we meet public policy objectives to not only attract players to the market, but keep them.

“Sometimes, something hasn’t been done before and you have to just try it, build in approaches to measure it as you go along, and then continuously improve.”

“Perfection is never really achieved in this area, but collaborative regulation helps us be better everywhere.”

Applying Ontario’s lessons elsewhere

Flutter, BetMGM, and Rush Street are all multi-jurisdictional gaming operators with a deep footprint in multiple other jurisdictions, including numerous states in the U.S. market.

None may be as welcoming as Ontario in terms of the sheer number of licensed gaming operators, but every regulated market has its own nuances, its own goals and procedures and policies, and its own requirements of licensees.

Just because the landscape is different, though, doesn’t mean that lessons and learnings from Ontario can’t be applied elsewhere. Fourie, Taylor, and Caughill all noted that things they have done north of the border, helped by what Caughill called the “forward-looking work” of OLG and iGO, have yielded strong results elsewhere.

“Because we operate across many jurisdictions with various programs, we have seen this requirement for continuous improvement and evaluation,” Fourie explained. “We bring back those learnings and insights… that’s the key to playing in a standard, sustainable manner, and then you’re able to bring the customer along in the journey with you.”

“Perfection is never really achieved in this area,” acknowledged Taylor. “But collaborative regulation helps us be better everywhere.”

“Sometimes, innovation just requires some creative thinking.”

It’s not a one-way street, either.

Jarmain, the only panelist sitting firmly on the other side of the fence between operator and regulator, noted that the multi-jurisdictional factor can also work in the reverse.

“We’re now conducting and managing 50-plus operators with experience all over the world,” Jarmain noted. “We’ve had the opportunity to learn a lot from their experiences, what has worked elsewhere, what has maybe not worked. Sometimes, innovation just requires some creative thinking.”

The message from Ontario is clear: when regulatory oversight is collaborative, safer gambling innovation abounds.

This article first appeared in the January 2025 issue of Canadian Gaming Business magazine.