Safer Gambling Week is an important opportunity to raise awareness and communicate relevant messaging, both internally and externally, about what The Pools is doing to help protect our players and keep them safe.

It also offers The Pools a great chance to show how we are using technology to improve our safer gambling controls, with safer gambling a golden thread that runs through the culture of our organisation.

At The Pools, we have a number of safer gambling initiatives, including a compliance committee, that the whole ExCo and our player protection staff sit on and feed into. We also have regular training sessions from external providers, people with lived experience of gambling-related harm, promoting discussion and testing our internal controls to make sure our staff learn from real-world scenarios.

On top of that, we keep up to date with Gambling Commission releases on penalties and settlements within the industry to stress test our own controls and to make sure that we’re learning from where others have failed.

We offer our customers all standard tools including deposit limits, wager limits, time-outs and self-exclusion, and we welcome the recent regulatory change inviting customers to opt in or out of setting a deposit limit upon registration. Players are contacted regularly to share their transaction history, which is a good move from the Gambling Commission, and it enables us to promote player education regarding spend and affordability.

Tech-forward

At The Pools, we have also introduced a new risk-based CPP (Crucial Player Protection) model, working for the last four months to integrate that tool with our back-office system. That gives us a much more intuitive method of spotting early signs of gambling-related harm, using an algorithm which is constantly stress-tested. It allows us to start being a lot more proactive with our player communications.

CPP is a tool that helps inform our growing compliance team, giving them a lot more information about a range of markers of harm such as increased deposit limits or the addition of different payment methods. The CPP provides data points for 28 markers of harm and uses an algorithm to produce a risk score. What that allows us to do is tailor our interactions with players.

A low-risk player might receive a reminder about the safer gambling tools, a medium- risk player may get a very tailored interaction, either by a pop-up message or a telephone call. Whereas a high-risk player, can receive an automated stop or restriction to their account, adding friction to their journey, which is sometimes necessary. That interaction can be difficult, but we can educate, inform and see behavioural change in the player before we allow them to continue their relationship with us.

Measuring the effectiveness of safer gambling strategies is key and an area where a lot of operators are not meeting the requirements of the Gambling Commission. At The Pools, off the back of the launch of CPP, and the other measures that we’ve brought in, we’re doing a lot of work in this area. For instance, we are measuring the effectiveness of the recent regulation change around deposit limits, and the impact of our tier-led messages and our player phone calls against behavioural change, to understand if they’ve been effective. If they have not, then we are using that data to inform how we can continuously improve our strategy.

Although it is important to highlight messaging around protecting players and the tools that are used, Safer Gambling Week goes far beyond that, and it should be something that we’re talking about on a much more regular, daily basis.

Having joined The Pools earlier this year as director of customer success and operations, I am bringing experience from LeoVegas and MrQ to understand how The Pools can look at the bigger picture. I’m here to help The Pools grow commercially, but by doing so in a safe and responsible way. Going beyond Safer Gambling Week, we’ll be looking to build upon the great experience of our senior management team, which will be reflected in how we communicate with players around safety and responsible play heading into 2026.

Joseph Carter-Bell is responsible for overseeing iconic British betting brand The Pools’ customer service, customer success and operational compliance offerings, creating a more cohesive player journey for The Pools customers.

He has 15 years’ experience across the customer service and safer gambling sectors, joining The Pools from MrQ.

The post Safer Gambling Week: The Pools on continuously improving in-house RG strategies first appeared on EGR Intel.