New Jersey’s gaming regulator is ready to up the ante on the player protection measures it requires from its licensed operators.
The NJ Division of Gaming Enforcement (DGE) has published a new set of proposed regulations that would mandate certain responsible gambling measures in the Garden State.
“Our responsible gaming best practices for internet gaming are being turned into regulations,” said the DGE’s Assistant Bureau Chief and Responsible Gaming lead Jamie McKelvey during an iDEA Growth webinar on player protection on Sept. 16. The proposed measures were published in the New Jersey Register this week and are open for public comment until mid-November.
The plan includes requiring each online operator to designate one or more “responsible gaming leads” to identify and monitor at-risk patrons, as well as establishing a hard list of 10 “triggers” for determining problem gambling trends in players and wagering accounts.
The player behavior triggers include things such as deposits exceeding certain thresholds in certain time periods, multiple cool-off requests in a certain period of time, three consecutive increases to responsible gaming limits such as deposit or loss limits within a seven-day period, and large increases in time spent logged into an account or amount wagered.
If players were identified as potential problem gamblers under the new measuring system, the operator in question would have to identify the player as potentially at-risk and follow a three-step process of outreach. First would be the operator sending an email with RG information, then the player would be blocked from wagering until they watch a video tutorial. Finally, if the issue persisted, the operator’s designated RG lead would seek to contact the player directly by phone or video call.
If a player’s gambling activity was deemed to be seriously and repeatedly problematic beyond that three-step process, their account could be shut down.
Years in the making
While Gov. Phil Murphy signed an order to establish a Responsible Gaming Task Force last year, McKelvey said during the webinar that the idea of mandating responsible gambling regulations dates back to well before that task force was set up.
“We’ve been working on them for several years,” she said on the iDEA Growth webinar. “Then, the responsible gaming task force came about as a result in part of a Rutgers study, which found that New Jersey residents had a much higher rate of problem gambling behavior than the rest of the nation.”
Most licensed operators, working with the DGE, already implement many similar measures on their platforms. But the state gaming regulator intends to harden these provisions into a set of mandatory regulations.
McKelvey noted that New Jersey’s gambling set-up poses challenges, such as the lack of a universal self-exclusion list between different types of gambling as well as differing minimum gambling ages for sports betting and casino gaming (21) compared to lottery, DFS and horse racing (18).
Time to ask operators to do more
The proposed RG regulations won’t be made mandatory anytime soon. McKelvey said that even beyond the close of the public comment period, it will be a months-long process to refine them and implement them.
“As a regulator, we have a very unique challenge,” she noted. “Obviously, we are here to make sure that the industry meets certain milestones and certain standards, but we also need to make sure that we aren’t stifling innovation through these regulations, and that they are moldable enough to continue to grow as the research and data continues.”
Ultimately, though, she stressed that the NJ DGE is looking to take a harder line on standardizing responsible gambling efforts in the state’s longstanding regulated online gambling market.
The list of monitoring triggers in the document leaves space for iteration, noting that any additional triggers identified by the operator or the DGE could be added at a later date.
“We have these 10 factors identified,” McKelvey added. “If it turns out later that those aren’t the 10 best ones, that there are others out there that are superior, we need to have that flexibility to be able to modify that. If we are prescriptive on how operators are able to monitor this patron behavior, that could backfire and stifle innovation and prevent forward movement.”
