For years, gambling stakeholders and detractors alike have been calling for the development and implementation of innovative new problem and responsible gambling (RG) initiatives. One such example could be a new partnership between Mindway AI and Kindbridge Behavioural Health.
Based in Tennessee, Kindbridge is a telehealth clinic that specialises in addiction treatment and counselling. Mindway is a Danish software supplier whose technology is used around the world to detect problem gambling and assess player risk.
The two are joining forces in an effort to create a comprehensive detection and treatment pipeline. Used together, Mindway would identify at-risk players who could then benefit from treatment through Kindbridge. The companies share mutual clients and will work to use those as tests for the combined efforts. Collaboration is expected to ramp up around the start of next year. But the partnership was long in the making.
“We’ve been working on this in the background for awhile,” Kindbridge founder and CEO Daniel Umfleet told iGB. “It’s probably been going on really for about 18 months.”
He added that the timing is “perfect” with Kindbridge “building out its capacity” and with risk scoring “becoming more of a front-and-centre regulatory issue”.
A long-term, global perspective
Mindway CEO Rasmus Kjaergaard noted that supplier is live in 37 countries, including the US and across four continents. This type of collaboration could be very successful in North America and there is “no reason why we couldn’t expand elsewhere”, he said, resources permitting. But that kind of growth will take time.
“There’s a global objective in a longer sense together, but that has to come in steps,” he noted. “Obviously it makes sense to start where we are already operating either side and combine our forces there and see how it can grow.”
Kindbridge currently operates in the US, Canada and is beginning to “ramp up UK services”, Umfleet said. He called those three the “near-future targets” to start testing. Over time, future growth would depend on demand, but simple maths indicates that that’s not the issue.
“Our biggest customer has two million active players a day in one jurisdiction here in Europe,” Kjaergaard said. “Multiplied by [standard problem gambling prevalence of 1%-2%], that’s still quite a lot of cases to handle. So you need systems in place that are automated and very optimised for the purpose of handling the worst cases first.”
Personalised messaging key
Part of the difficulty with existing RG programmes is that they often cast a very wide net. With AI-powered technology like Mindway’s, players are assessed on a risk scale that can then allow a company like Kindbridge to tailor services specifically to that individual, thereby increasing the chances of successful treatment.
“What we are looking to get out of this long-term is validating that the risk scoring has a correlation with mental health-related issues,” Umfleet said. “Therefore there needs to be a continuous feedback loop with the risk scoring in the mental health side of the equation to ensure that there’s a direct bridge happening when somebody of a certain risk profile gets identified, they then get direct access to the right kind of resources.”
Timing is another factor that makes it difficult to help those who struggle with problem gambling. Umfleet explained that for some players, “you can see their [risk] score change over time”. By partnering with Mindway, Kindbridge can identify those with low scores and start to develop a line of communication. This dialogue would then evolve based on the level of risk a player is exhibiting.
“Whether it’s just light-level, light-touch mental health-related issues, or if it’s all the way up in the addiction category, they’re more likely to engage with the service because you’re communicating with them more frequently based off of how they’re sliding around on the risk scale,” Umfleet said.
RG/PG top of mind for global industry
The partnership comes at a time when responsible and problem gambling have taken centre stage around the world. US lawmakers have proposed federal sports betting legislation in response to a perceived lack of effective RG safeguards. The UK has implemented online slot limits and affordability checks. Concern about player protection has cast doubt on the nascent Brazilian market.
In yet another example, Kjaergaard cited new requirements for Dutch operators.
“In what could be perceived as somewhat extreme, from an American perspective, in the Netherlands they just put new enhanced checks in place where if you detect something wrong with particular risk factors, or harm with a player, you as an operator have to reach out to the customer within an hour,” he explained.
The increasingly bright spotlight surrounding problem gambling requires stakeholders to get creative in their solutions. In order to meet players where they are, collaborative approaches such as this might be the best answer.
“We track risk and we do it quite well,” Kjaergaard said. “But we do not give diagnosis on addiction and the beauty in partnering with a company like Kindbridge is that you take our risk scoring and turn it into helping real people with real problems.”
