Industry News
“Players Who Feel Safe Are More Likely to Stay with A Sole Operator For Longer”
While iGaming brands amass social responsibility fines by the millions allowing unhealthy behavior go unchecked, a better way exists for both operator and player
Responsible Gaming is more than just an industry buzzword or something to look out for. It has real-life consequences for everyone involved: brands, operators and, more importantly – regular people. As the National Council on Problem Gambling marks its Gambling Awareness Month, we stopped to take stock of social responsibility in the iGaming industry – is enough being done? What is holding us back as an industry? And what will the future bring?
The Brands & Regulator
Recent years have seen a crackdown by the regulator on many iGaming fronts, specifically social responsibility or as we know it – Responsible Gaming. In 2021 brands amassed more than £15M in fines for failing to meet social responsibility regulations and protect at-risk players. The trend is gaining momentum, just three months into 2022, operators have already amassed over £15M in social responsibility fines, yes, similar to the entirety of 2021. The total sum of penalties in 2019 covering all violations? A ‘mere’ £17M. Operators need to comply and fast to keep the money on their side of the table.
The people
The human price of operators’ reluctance to comply with social responsibility regulations is clear. There are degrees of unhealthy behavior, but at its worst, a gambling problem can devastate a person’s life, affect their loved ones, mental health, livelihood, and more. The risk shouldn’t be underestimated, regulatory zeal suggests.
“From my study and understanding these pathways, it seems that the need for entertainment and escapism leads certain players. In other cases, they’re driven by more impulsivity issues and a lack of ability to control one’s behavior,” said Sally Gainsbury, Director of the University of Sydney Gambling Treatment & Research Clinic.
“This doesn’t only affect the individual themself, but also 6-10 people around them. That’s why it’s important to prevent harm before they reach this critical level.”
So what’s stopping operators from simply, you know, following Responsible Gaming regulations? “The biggest hurdle is the lack of understanding of the appropriate KPIs and required actions brought down by regulators to work best towards minimizing gambling harm,” said Gainsbury.
If operators limit their most active players, the VIPs of sorts, it’s only reasonable to assume they’ll suffer massive revenue hit, much higher than any fine. But acting on RG makes more financial sense than one might think. “In the modern iGaming world, which includes land-based casinos, sports betting, digital, and all gaming forms, you don’t have to choose between revenue and socially responsible gaming,” said Michael Pollock, Spectrum Gaming Group’s Managing Director.
“The companies that tend to be the most profitable and the market leaders are the ones that take this responsibility seriously for several reasons: One – if you’re irresponsible, you’re leaving your customers dry. You want the customer to afford what they are spending. That’s the heart of responsible Gaming. Two, if you want the public’s trust and to be recognized as one that can be trusted with their money, RG has to be front and center in your business practices. If not, you’re not going to be a market leader. And three, if you don’t take the responsibility seriously, regulators will prevent your brand from renewing your license,” added Pollock.
The solution
Optimove, the leading CRM Marketing platform, has a different approach to Responsible Gaming. It offers a predictive model to identify players-at-risk and recognizes three maturity levels of an operator regarding responsible Gaming:
- Basic – Providing players the ability to self-exclude at any time. This is typically also the most rudimentary requirement of most regulated regions.
- Competitive – Exploring the various attributes that players demonstrate before they self-exclude. By creating a segment of customers who self-excluded, operators can identify suspicious attributes to try and mitigate them and reduce the number of players who become at-risk players.
- Advanced – Implementing a machine learning algorithm that helps operators predict which players are likely to become at-risk ahead of time. Such algorithm also allows operators to differentiate between at-risk and VIP players, who often share a few similar attributes.
VIP or At-Risk?
In the UK there has been a clear move by the main Operators towards a mass market/recreational customer. The average player values dropped accordingly and VIP programs have basically came to an end. This has been driven by the concerns around problem gambling and the big overlap between what was previously described as a VIP and what is now understood to be problem gambling issues.
Many companies still have two separate departments, CRM and RG, but the reality is that the result of this operational setup and the contradictions between definitions of success in each field, means that the different teams are not necessarily driving in the same direction when it comes to player care.
Use outreach to educate
Instead of creating player journeys consisting of only promotional campaigns, operators should begin putting a heavier emphasis on educational and informative content that encourages players to adopt healthier behaviors and reduce the number of players who become at-risk.
Operators must communicate carefully in the competitive gaming market, where 1-to-1 marketing communications is still an integral part of the experience. By segmenting customers into tiers based on their risk levels and adjusting the informative-to-promotional campaign ratio accordingly, operators can maintain the marketing aspect, and improve their revenue, while instilling more robust socially responsible practices.
Metrics to monitor
If traditional CRM marketing focuses on promotional offers to measure incremental Net Gaming Revenue as the main KPI, socially responsible marketing mix needs to measure player migrations from one risk level to another and overall retention rates.
To identify the marketing strategies that work best to maintain a high level of healthy-player engagement, operators should measure their campaigns’ impact on player behavior over time. Similar to A/B/n testing different treatments, entire player-journeys should be tested to evaluate how they affect player behavior and risk-level migrations.
Using different CRM Marketing tools, like Optimove, operators can easily create entire marketing flows and monitor how players migrate from one risk level to another, and adjust their marketing strategies as necessary. Gaining insight into how both campaigns and flows perform can empower operators to optimize their marketing strategy and reduce the number of players who become at risk.
For instance, one gaming operator segmented its customers into tiers based on their low, medium, and high-risk levels. Players with a low-risk level were given the occasional promotional campaign, while players in the medium risk level received 30% of the promotional campaigns, and so forth.
The future
On the predictive side of things, there is a huge amount more that operators can be doing to identify behavioural issues at a much earlier point in the customer journey. Once predictive models – which help identify at-risk players – are in place, operators do not need take a manual binary decision on whether to cut the player off or leave them alone, but can begin taking the customer through a RG journey that may first provide instructive content around the issue. If the behaviour doesn’t change, then limits can be brought in before finally cutting the customer off.
In the near future Responsible Gaming will be integrated into all business sides and will not remain a siloed responsibility of few. That means an organizational overhaul around the issue as every department within an operator or platform must be guided by RG principles. For example, in CRM terms, it means CRM Teams will have:
- A clear understanding of what RG principles need to be followed.
- These principles will be converted to customer attributes that are easily trackable and monitorable.
- Teams will have programs in place to foment healthy gaming behavior.
- Teams will have marketing tools that autonomously redirect customers to those programs when needed (to prevent and amend situations).
Doing this at scale however is challenging which is why AI should be the lead in predicting, identifying and managing at-risk players. Once a player is identified as being at-risk, the AI algorithm will autonomously reassign them to the appropriate segment, where the messages are less salesy, focusing more on adjusting the behavior, understanding the problem better and taking a step back if needed.
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PayDo, a leading global payment ecosystem founded by Serhii Zakharov – who at just 25 became one of the youngest CEOs approved by the FCA to run an Electronic Money Institution in the UK, announced a series of strategic infrastructure launches designed to dismantle the costly complexity of modern payment stacks.
The releases—Direct SEPA & SEPA Instant access, USD SWIFT Accounts, Dedicated C2B Open Banking Collections Accounts and Direct VISA and MasterCard Acquiring—are not standalone products, but integrated components of PayDo’s unified platform.
For the first time, online businesses can access this comprehensive suite under a single contract, one technical integration and with a dedicated account manager, eliminating the operational burden of managing multiple providers.
The launches directly address the primary pain points of payment fragmentation: high costs from intermediaries, slow settlement times, compliance overhead and loss of control. By securing direct memberships and building proprietary technology, PayDo now offers businesses enterprise-grade infrastructure with the agility of a FinTech.
The new services include:
• Direct SEPA & SEPA Instant: As a direct SEPA member, PayDo provides native European processing with no intermediary routing. This ensures faster, lower-cost euro transactions with immediate settlement capabilities via SEPA Instant.
• USD SWIFT Accounts: Online businesses can now receive dedicated USD account details via the SWIFT network, significantly reducing delays and fees associated with cross-border USD transactions, a critical need for a variety of cross-border operating online businesses.
• Dedicated C2B Open Banking Collections Accounts: A pioneering innovation, this service revolutionises how businesses receive payments. It enables instant, direct bank-to-business transfers from customers, offering an alternative to card networks with correct funds tracking and allocation, lower costs and real-time settlement. Functionality supports processing of +100,000 daily transactions.
• Launch of Direct Acquiring: PayDo is now a principal member acquirer for both Visa and Mastercard. This direct relationship removes a layer of intermediaries, reducing processing costs, improving authorisation rates and giving merchants greater control and transparency over their card payment flows.
These services are delivered within PayDo’s unified ecosystem, which also includes its signatory innovation – non-redirect E-Wallet checkout. This earlier innovation provided merchants with full friendly-fraud protection without any rolling reserve requirements. The new ecosystem approach allows companies in sectors like e-commerce, IT services, marketplaces, gaming and other Fintechs to streamline their entire financial operations, turning payment management from a resource drain into a competitive advantage.
Serhii Zakharov, CEO and Founder of PayDo, said: “For years, businesses have been forced to stitch together a patchwork of payment providers, each adding cost, complexity, and delay. We believe the future is not in more fragmentation, but in intelligent unification. These launches are not just new features; they are the foundational pillars of a coherent ecosystem. We are giving our clients direct control over the core rails of finance—from SEPA and SWIFT to card acquiring and Open Banking—all through one partnership. This is how we eliminate the hidden tax of fragmentation and empower businesses to scale globally with clarity and efficiency.”
PayDo’s ecosystem now processes over €5B annually for over 1000 businesses, leveraging its full regulatory compliance in the UK, Canada and the EU. The company’s direct infrastructure model is proving that the next wave of Fintech growth will be driven by consolidation and seamless integration, not further division.
The post PayDo Launches Unified Payment Infrastructure Suite for Digital Businesses appeared first on European Gaming Industry News.
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While prediction markets have recently attracted increased public attention across politics, finance and culture, Meridianbet, part of the Golden Matrix Group has supported user-generated real-world prediction markets for more than a decade through its proprietary product branded as Free Bet.
For the second half of 2025, customer participation on the Free Bet platform has recorded an 11.5% increase in ticket volumes, reflecting renewed engagement across prediction markets tied to major elections, entertainment outcomes, weather forecasting and novelty-event propositions. Free Bet continues to represent a relatively small and non-material portion of Meridianbet’s overall wagering activity.
Free Bet allows customers to propose wagers on measurable real-world outcomes across sports, politics, entertainment awards, weather forecasting, financial milestones and social statistics. Once a proposed market passes regulatory, settlement and risk review, Meridianbet acts as the professional market maker, prices the odds and takes the lay side of each wager within the Company’s licensed sportsbook framework. This single-market-maker structure enables the delivery of prediction-market-style wagering to mass-market users while ensuring regulatory compliance, operational stability and standardised settlement.
In practical terms, customers initiate Free Bet markets by submitting their own proposed prediction events through Meridianbet’s platforms or retail network. Each submission is reviewed to ensure that the proposed event is lawful, ethically appropriate, clearly measurable and capable of unambiguous settlement under applicable regulatory standards. Only after passing these checks is the event accepted and priced by Meridianbet’s trading operators, who establish odds and offer the market to the customer for wagering.
Top Prediction Markets on Meridianbet
Over the past five years, Meridianbet customers have created and wagered on thousands of custom prediction markets reflecting major real-world outcomes across political cycles, cultural awards, financial milestones, weather forecasting and social trends.
Based on internal ticket volume and platform engagement data, the following five prediction markets have ranked among the most actively played on Meridianbet during this period:
U.S. Presidential Election
Binary outcome markets and related propositions tied to the U.S. presidential election results.
Global Entertainment Awards
Custom markets associated with major award outcomes including Oscars Best Picture and BBC Sports Personality of the Year.
Weather Prediction Markets
Seasonal and location-specific forecasts, including snowfall occurrence and temperature benchmark outcomes during late winter and early spring periods.
Social Outcome Markets
Demographic and statistical propositions connected to public milestones, including birth-gender distributions during peak holiday periods and other large-scale social outcome measurements.
Regulatory & Availability Notice
The Free Bet product and related prediction market offerings are provided strictly in accordance with applicable national and local regulatory requirements and are available only in jurisdictions where such wagering formats are duly authorised by law.
Availability, market scope and wagering features may vary by location and regulatory regime. Certain jurisdictions may restrict or prohibit participation in custom prediction-based wagering products.
The post Meridianbet Reports Renewed Engagement in Custom Prediction Markets in H2 2025 appeared first on European Gaming Industry News.
AI-Driven Optimisation
HilltopAds Introduces Dedicated iGaming Feature Suite and Managed Performance Service
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HilltopAds announced the rollout of a specialised feature set built exclusively for iGaming advertisers, reinforcing the company’s focus on performance-driven media buying across global markets.
At the center of the release are newly launched, ready-to-use white- and blacklists, curated from premium traffic sources that have consistently shown strong results for iGaming campaigns. These lists are derived from performance data across thousands of active advertisers and are designed to reduce testing time while increasing the predictability of campaign outcomes.
HilltopAds is also introducing a full-managed service, giving advertisers access to dedicated iGaming specialists who will set up, launch and continuously optimise campaigns based on individual KPI requirements. This service aims to support teams looking for deeper expertise, streamlined workflows or hands-off performance management.
To mark the launch, HilltopAds is providing a $2000 bonus for all direct iGaming advertisers making their first deposit of $5000 or more using the promo code IGAVCIP.
These updates complement HilltopAds’ existing capabilities for the iGaming sector, including:
• Massive Global Reach: Over 273B monthly impressions available across 250+ countries.
• Premium Direct Traffic: Access to 39,000+ vetted websites suitable for iGaming user acquisition.
• AI-Driven Optimisation: Automated tools focused on maximising bets, deposits and high-value player actions.
• Flexible Bidding Models: CPM, CPC and CPA Goal options tailored for scale and performance control.
• Specialised Network Infrastructure: Built to support consistent delivery, stable volumes and transparent reporting for regulated verticals.
With these additions, HilltopAds aims to provide iGaming advertisers with a more data-grounded, efficient and scalable environment for user acquisition.
The post HilltopAds Introduces Dedicated iGaming Feature Suite and Managed Performance Service appeared first on European Gaming Industry News.
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