Ahead of the SBC Summit in Lisbon, we spoke to the Managing Director of IBAS (The Independent Betting Adjudication Service), Richard Hayler, who revealed what he believes the impact will be from the PPB vs Durber case.
iGaming Expert: How significant do you believe the result of the PPB vs Durber case will be when it comes to UK player engagement and changing the UK landscape?
Richard Hayler: I’d bet against it changing the landscape, but I hope that it has helped to sharpen thinking in the way that rules and terms are managed. It was another pertinent reminder that anything published (or not published) without enough thought might come back to haunt you.
The media picked up on the principle of “what you see is what you get” being upheld, and IBAS is reflecting on whether this case should change any of the approaches we have previously taken to broadly similar or related cases. Anyone who has read the full judgement will see that a wide range of factors were involved in the outcome, while the judge expressed regret that he had not been given the opportunity to consider industry standard practice as part of his thinking, because, he said, that had not been presented to him in evidence.
In terms of player engagement, the judge was critical of the lack of understanding shown towards the customer in terms of how much impact a person believing they had won £1m plus and being told they had actually won about £20,000 would have on them, financially and therefore emotionally. This is clearly an extreme case, but as a general point, I believe the industry could sometimes do a lot better in acknowledging the disappointment and frustration that errors cause for their customers. Some do it better than others, of course, but there isn’t always a lot of empathy shown in customer service communication.
iGX: Was it crucial that the error came down to a human error rather than a computer error or mishap?
RH: It’s impossible to know without being able to ask the judge, but there were clues. In one part, the judgment seemed to be leading the operator towards seeking damages from the game supplier, having acknowledged that the dispute arose from an error in the game mapping.
This is another challenge for IBAS, although it isn’t exclusive to this case by any means.
Traditionally, when looking at cases where ‘obvious error’ rules were cited by betting operators as grounds to change the odds quoted to a customer, our Adjudication Panel would distinguish mistakes between clear inputting errors (typing 66/1 instead of 6/1 into a system, or two teams’ odds being accidentally swapped) and errors of judgement (e.g. through lack of research etc.). In most cases, we said that it was reasonable for a company to correct the former, but not the latter.
That distinction is increasingly blurred. If a betting market is managed by automated software and the software fails, do we accept that any incorrect prices published as a result can be corrected, because the system clearly didn’t work as intended, or can’t be corrected, because the software was poorly programmed? We look at each case on its merits, but any High Court judgement exploring similar questions is bound to influence our adjudicators.
One of the points raised in this particular case was that the error was made on 1 September but was not picked up until 23 October. It is considerably more difficult to argue that something was obviously wrong if your own employees didn’t notice for almost eight weeks.
IGX: What do you believe operators will have learnt from the ruling? Do you think they will have made significant changes to Ts & Cs?
RH: I think it was a helpful lesson against complacency. It shouldn’t have been a revelation to the industry that regularly reviewing Ts and Cs, checking for potential conflicts/clashes of terms and making sure that all new games and products have had their potential issues and complications thought through is vital. The courts are unlikely to accept that something unwritten was intended, or that something fundamental but hidden away can be retrospectively applied, and neither will IBAS.
The judgement was critical that Paddy Power had failed to highlight to the customer when she accepted their Ts and Cs (i.e. when she opened her account) that when playing slots games, the result is determined by server records rather than what you see on the screen. The judge argued that as this was a key term, the company had a duty to have made it more prominent than it was in the Ts and Cs.
I’m not sure that view is realistic.
When a person opens an account with any gambling operator, the company has no idea what products that customer plans to use. They might only ever want to play bingo, live studio-based games, or bet on golf. Most operators have hundreds, if not thousands, of rules or terms and each one has the potential to be critical to a disputed transaction.
IBAS’s view is that the important thing for operators to consider is how key terms are highlighted to customers once they are engaging with the relevant products.
If I ran an online business offering slots games, on the back of this judgment, I would probably include a notice displayed while each game is loading to warn that game outcomes are determined by what is recorded on the server.
In sports betting, the best example of improving the clarity of terms is found in cup football matches. When I joined IBAS 14 years ago, any significant football match which went to extra time or penalties would generate a bag full of complaints from people who had bet on whichever team qualified, complaining that their bet on the team had been wrongly settled as a loser. We had to explain to each one the distinction between betting on the ‘match’ (90 minutes) and betting on which team would qualify, or lift the trophy.
Through significant feedback from IBAS cases to the industry, we find that almost all of these betting markets are labelled and explained much more clearly than they used to be, and as a result, the number of complaints has fallen significantly. Maybe by over 80%.
iGX: Can you provide us with an update on the ambition of the UK government’s White Paper plans to establish an ombudsman, and do you believe it is practical?
RH: When the White Paper was published, the government set an ambitious target of making it operational in little more than a year. Instead, we are at a stage now where reference to the ombudsman has been dropped from the majority of government speeches on gambling reform, and it seems to be a notably lower industry priority now.
If it doesn’t progress, I see it as a missed opportunity. Not only do I think an ombudsman would be practical, I believe it would have a lot of advantages in terms of clarity and consistency for consumers and operators. I think expanding the remit of the cases that ADR bodies look at would be a big reputational benefit to the industry – it’s a bad look that there is no independent scrutiny of individual claims that companies have acted irresponsibly, when the industry’s message is that it wants to look after its customers.
Considering claims of irresponsible conduct will be extremely challenging for anyone who takes them on. There is some limited UK legal precedent to work with, but it’s an area that is largely unknown. Where would the line be drawn between the responsibility of the individual and the company? It will take a lot of work and cooperation with the regulator around standards, definitions and to make sure the ombudsman doesn’t stray into becoming a secondary regulator. But is that a reason to avoid doing it? It shouldn’t be.
iGX: Does any legal responsibility sit with the banks and financial institutions when it comes to the protection of vulnerable players?
RH: There is a balance of responsibility. If a gambling ombudsman is created, it will need to build an effective working relationship with the Financial Ombudsman and possibly agree on a unique data-sharing arrangement for instances where an individual lodges claims against both their bank and a gambling operator. Cooperation would help everyone get a better picture of what’s happened and where there might be fault. It would also reduce the risk of conflicting decisions being published, or complainants receiving redress from both bodies to the point of financially profiting from the experience.
iGX: In terms of player complaints, do you believe there is anything the UK can learn from other jurisdictions?
RH: I think the UK has probably been ahead of the curve in complaint handling. When the UK Gambling Commission mandated participation in an ADR scheme as a licence condition, that was an important step that some other jurisdictions have followed. IBAS itself was set up in 1998, long before the 2005 Gambling Act, so there has been a long-engrained culture of wanting to assist players who believe they have been treated unfairly.
One of my colleagues showed me an article recently about an issue in one of the US states where an apparently incorrect price was published during a televised sporting event, which generated a number of high-profile complaints. The article mentioned that the operator in question had corrected the odds in line with their terms and conditions, having first obtained the approval of the local regulator.
That may not be the most efficient approach – it would need very close cooperation – but in theory, there is a lot to like about the principle of error corrections requiring independent sign-off before being implemented. It would hopefully give players greater confidence that what had happened to them wasn’t unfair and could help to reduce the number of complaints.
iGX: What are the most common complaints that you receive at IBAS?
RH: This varies from year to year and mirrors trends in gambling at the time. Currently, the most common themes concern blocked withdrawals pending identity or source of funds checks, or disputes about the accuracy and fairness of sporting data used to settle Bet Builder or statistical bets.
iGX: Generally speaking, how have the themes of complaints from players changed in recent years?
RH: For many years, the terms and conditions of casino bonus offers dominated our inboxes. Many complained that they were too complicated or inaccessible. Before that, most of our disputes concerned ambiguously worded bets, either the way they had been promoted or the way they had been handwritten in betting shops.
I hope that some of the decisions IBAS has published, or the debates we have entered into with operators in the course of considering disputes, have played some part in improving some practices and helping cut complaint volumes.
iGX: How significant do you see the threat of the black market? Why is it so crucial that we keep players away from this?
RH: It’s difficult for us to judge because the act of lodging a dispute with IBAS requires a registered, licensed operator to be selected on our claim form. If a business isn’t there, it usually highlights to a complainant that we won’t be able to help them.
Despite that, we are asked perhaps 20 times a month whether we can assist with helping to recover lost funds or unpaid winnings from companies that aren’t licensed to legally accept that custom. Sometimes they are licensed in other jurisdictions, occasionally they seem to have no licence at all. It’s clearly an issue. We can’t detect quite how much.
iGX: Why is it so crucial that the industry comes together to speak at events like the SBC Summit? What are you most eager to learn from the event?
RH: We see ourselves not as part of the industry but as a key service provider both to the industry and its customers. Events like the SBC Summit give us a chance to highlight issues we think are important to a broad group of people with power and responsibility to make a meaningful difference.
When I do attend SBC events, it always strikes me how much benefit there is to speaking to counterparts at other companies or services, face to face, outside of the confines of a structured meeting with an agenda, etc.
Sometimes you learn about views or developments you’d never have picked up if you hadn’t met that person. Sometimes you gain a better understanding of an issue you thought you’d already grasped.
Source: https://igamingexpert.com/features/ibas-uk-analysis-complaints/
