HooYu calls for new era of KYC – Understand Your Customer

Customer onboarding and due diligence solution provider HooYu has rallied the gaming industry with a call to reduce gambling harm by improving problem gambler profiling techniques.  

As the emphasis on knowing-your-customer (KYC) and protecting continues to grow, HooYu believes many operators can do more to properly understand their circumstances.  

Coinciding with Responsible Gambling Week, HooYu and the Young Gamers & Gamblers Education Trust (YGAM) are hosting a webinar interviewing a former problem gambler and his story of how payday loans can further fuel harm.

This is part of the company’s push to change operator perspectives from KYC to UYC (understanding-your-customer.) 

Danny Cheetham, reformed problem gambler and participant of the firm’s upcoming webinar, said: “At the height of my problem gambling I had 26 loans with payday loan operators and it quickly got to the point where my interest payments exceeded my salary.  

“I wish that the data had been made available to gaming operators to identify my source of funds as coming from payday loans that were fuelling my gambling problem.”   

Kev Clelland, YGAM director of education added: “We believe the earlier the intervention, the better at YGAM, which is why we want to inform, educate and safeguard young and vulnerable people around the potential harms caused by gambling.  

“However, whilst we do recognise that the operators have made huge strides in terms of protecting their customers, they can always look to do more, and using tech to decide when they need to perform outreach and ask their customer to consider their gambling behaviours is a positive step.”

In the last three years, the UK Gambling Commission fines have increased by 1,100% for failures in protecting players.

HooYu specified three key areas which they feel operators can improve upon including utilising their own customer data to develop a more holistic player profile.

This proposal includes a “behavioural and demographic scoring” that divides players to show risk of gambling harm.

Second, the firm believes operators should consult other customer intelligence data sources to uncover negative financial indicators such as payday loan applications and County Court Judgements.

The final recommendation also refers to utilising other data sources to identify multiple account holders and relapsed self-excluded gamblers.

David Pope, marketing director at HooYu concluded:“Operators should use their customer data to produce gambling harm propensity scores and segment customers. 

“At HooYu we help operators to identify gamblers that have been applying for payday loans to help operators inform affordability decisions.  

“Several leading operators have now started to provide us with their problem gambling customer data so that we can help them identify multiple account holders and relapsed problem gamblers.”