Clarion Payment Providers Summit - Ian Angus speech
20 May 2026
This speech was delivered by Director of Policy Ian Angus at the Clarion Payment Providers Summit on 20 May 2026.
Please note: This is the speech as drafted and may slightly differ from the delivered version.
Hello everyone, thank you for that welcome, I’m Ian Angus, Director of Policy at the Gambling Commission and it’s great to be here again, speaking to you all and with any luck answering your questions to at the end.
When I look at today’s agenda and the focus on ‘Compliance as Competitive Advantage’, on data driving decisions and innovation as a whole, I find a lot to welcome and frankly a lot of what I plan to say today fits into that too. Because at the Gambling Commission, here in Great Britain, we are always going to want compliance at the earliest opportunity. But within that we want to encourage innovation, both for compliance and to make gambling safer but also for the benefits for the customer experience as well. And as an evidence-based regulator, we absolutely want the best data, the best information to inform our decision making. So today I’ll be touching on where gambling is today as a sector in Great Britain (GB) and what our Business Plan is setting out for our priorities over the year ahead. The illegal market is of course an important area for the Commission and with increased resources coming on stream, an area I’ll also be discussing today. Linked to that and our objective of making gambling crime free, I will touch on our responsibilities around AML, in what is an important year for our work with the sector on this front. Finally, I’ll come back round to one of the themes of today and that is innovation.
Gambling has always been a sector that drives innovation. In Great Britain the intensely competitive market pushes this even further. Our last Gambling Survey of Great Britain annual report show participation over a four-week period stable at 48 per cent of the adult population between January 2024 and January 2025. More recent quarterly releases show that was the same through to the end of October. At the same time, Gross Gambling Yield (GGY) for the whole sector hit a new high of £16.8 billion for April ’24 to March ’25. Again, we have now started releasing quarterly figures for our regulatory returns as well and between July and September last year, the sector as a whole made £4.3 billion in GGY. This is the picture of a mature, competitive market, driving forwards through innovation. And a knack for innovation is a useful skill to have in changing times.
And they are of course changing times. These figures are, in some ways, a snap shot of where the industry was last Autumn, ahead of the UK Government Budget. Whilst the Gambling Commission doesn’t advise on tax and we don’t pretend to know what all the outcomes of that Budget will be on gambling, there were notable changes made and through our engagement with industry and public announcements, we are seeing changes as a result. The Treasury of course, foresaw some of these changes themselves and this takes me on to what we at the Commission are doing this financial year.
The Gambling Commission welcomed the £26 million over three years of funding for our efforts to combat illegal gambling and we think this is a sign of support in the effectiveness of the Commission in what we’ve done to tackle illegal gambling in recent years. And what we have done is frankly to develop a world-leading approach. Last financial year alone we:
issued 741 Cease and Desists to advertisers and operators
reported 397,527 URLs to various search engines and seen 266,667 URLs removed as a result so far
referred 1068 websites to the search engines for delisting
disrupted 1134 websites so that they have either been taken down or geo-blocked.
But of course, there is more we can do and that’s where the new funding comes in. Our Business Plan, which was published last month, sets out at a high level our intention to scale up, automate where appropriate, and develop our wider strategy to tackle illegal markets activity.
Our focus will grow to consider the drivers of consumer demand to the illegal market and how regulation can support innovation, aligned to the licensing objectives, that maintains the appeal of the licensed market.
We will also publish data and metrics to demonstrate impact and to provide insight into the dynamics of the illegal market. We have already continued to do just that, with an update on trends and our data approach to illegal gambling published as a blog late last month. I would recommend reading the whole piece but to summarise, the updated data extends what we have published from July last year through to February this year. Whilst we are open about the assumptions and margins for error associated with any estimate of illegal gambling, the new overall trendline does not appear to show a consistent or sustained growth in consumer engagement over the 21 months of data. We have explored the effects of seasonality and changes in VPN use – but neither suggest persistent growth. It’s always important not to over rely on data from a single source to tell the whole story on a topic as complex as illegal gambling. We continue to work on improvements to our methodology and – alongside gaining more insight from our own research - are seeking input from other international regulators and licensed operators to help verify and improve existing data sources and to identify additional datasets which can be used to improve understanding of the illegal market.
Beyond this, and as part of our work on the Government’s Illegal Gambling Taskforce – something I am pleased to be part of – we will also work with partners to create the first ever national risk assessment for the illegal market in Britain.
We will continue to increase the scale and impact of our enforcement and disruption activities building on our existing partnership working with government, law enforcement and other stakeholders.
You’ll have noted that through much of what I just said, I emphasised the role of working with others and that is because at the Commission we are clear that there is only so much we can do alone. The stats I quoted earlier, the tangible success those numbers show, are a result of our work with internet search providers and hosting companies and we’ve had other successes by working with other regulators, Government, operators and payment providers. So only by working together – everyone who can influence illegal gambling – can we maximise our impact and protect consumers and the licensed market.
Collaboration and engaging with stakeholders are key elements of our approach to the work we do, underlined in our Corporate Strategy. We’re into the last year of that Strategy now and the Business Plan I mentioned earlier covers how we will continue to deliver against it, beyond tackling illegal gambling. It sets out further work we will be doing in the year ahead in terms of:
further improving our data maturity and evidence base
continuing to both take decisive action and proactively engage with operators, to ensure compliance with our rules
and setting out our next steps on the implementation of the Gambling Act review white paper.
On that last point we are largely moving into the evaluation of what we have already introduced, having already implemented the vast majority of what we were responsible for. But there are two pieces of work to note, both approaching important points. Our Games Machines consultation and Financial Risk Assessments.
On the first, we published some early decisions on this in January and we expect to publish a full response this Summer. On Financial Risk Assessments (FRAs), it’s fair to say they have attracted some attention in recent months as well as plenty of coverage. Sadly, much of that has included ill informed or inaccurate content. We published a blog last month that updated on where we’ve got to on FRAs and which dealt with some of this inaccurate commentary. We don’t have time for me to go through all of that today but if you haven’t read it, I would recommend that you do. But to summarise, Financial Risk Assessments are not affordability checks by another name - the checks we have been piloting will not even attempt to make an assessment of what each customer can afford to gamble. Nor do the proposed thresholds for an assessment limit or cap customer spend. FRAs were identified in the 2023 white paper as the best way to bring a frictionless and consistent method for gambling firms to check whether a consumer is in financial difficulties. This proposal was supported by the former government then and is also supported by the current government today.
On the first, we published some early decisions on this in January and we expect to publish a full response this Summer. On Financial Risk Assessments, it’s fair to say they have attracted some attention in recent months as well as plenty of coverage. Sadly, much of that has included ill informed or inaccurate content. We published a blog last month that updated on where we’ve got to on FRAs and which dealt with some of this inaccurate commentary. We don’t have time for me to go through all of that today but if you haven’t read it, I would recommend that you do. But to summarise, Financial Risk Assessments are not affordability checks by another name - the checks we have been piloting will not even attempt to make an assessment of what each customer can afford to gamble. Nor do the proposed thresholds for an assessment limit or cap customer spend. FRAs were identified in the 2023 white paper as the best way to bring a frictionless and consistent method for gambling firms to check whether a consumer is in financial difficulties. This proposal was supported by the former government then and is also supported by the current government today.
And what’s more, the pilot shows that what we are proposing works. If implemented they can be frictionless. We have found:
less than 3 per cent of active customer accounts would trigger any steps by an operator under these proposals. In formulating recommendations, we will be mindful of this important targeting of the measure at the highest spending accounts
of these 3 per cent that would meet the requirements for an assessment, the pilot showed 97 per cent would successfully receive a frictionless assessment process. This is far better than what government estimated when they published the White Paper, which was 80 per cent
and only a very small proportion of active accounts would require an assessment and be unable do so in a frictionless manner. The pilot shows it would actually be 0.1 per cent, again, better than the white paper estimated. That’s only one in a 1000 accounts that would be unable to receive an assessment in a frictionless way. And even that number could be reduced further, by operators meeting their existing obligations at the start of the consumer relationship to ensure that customers’ details are correct and their identity had been appropriately verified.
These are good outcomes. Now, no one should hear this and think we have pre-determined to implement FRAs – only our Board can decide that. But the Commission Board will be looking at this very soon. And of course, if the decision to implement is made, we will work closely with Government, operators and credit reference agencies on the best way to implement them. That will include establishing an implementation group that will jointly develop the details of a sensible implementation plan and timetable. And that in turn will help shape the guidance to operators to ensure that they take a proportionate approach to interacting with customers where financial risk is identified. And finally on this, if implemented, FRAs will allow us to give clear guidance to operators that they should not require consumers to provide documents to assess financial risk following a financial risk assessment. And to provide assurance to industry, our approach to compliance would also ensure that failing to request documents following a financial risk assessment would not be a reason for regulatory action. In fact, doing so would serve no legitimate regulatory purpose in such circumstances.
You might think illegal gambling and completing the implementation of our part of the Gambling Act Review was enough for one update, but I have a couple of other areas that I wanted to flag with you.
First the important battle to frustrate and stamp out money laundering and terrorist financing. At the Commission AML is a vital area of work and if anything this will be all the more so in the year or two ahead. We are already preparing for the latest FATF – or Financial Action Task Force – assessment for the UK next year and this is a real opportunity to make sure both ourselves and industry are keeping our policies and processes honed and effective to the risks of money laundering today. Colleagues in our compliance team have already started further engagement with industry and following the publication last year of the UK AML risk assessment, we will be publishing our own updated risk assessment in the near future. And operators will need to make sure they review that and any changes it requires for their businesses when we do.
To finish though, I wanted to pick up again on one of the inherent strengths of the gambling sector and that is innovation. And at a time when the illegal market may be ramping up its attack on the licensed sector, we want to make clear our support for innovation where it’s in line with our licensing objectives. If you have ideas to improve the customer experience, make it more positive, make it more competitive, we want to hear them. The current statutory and public policy framework does place some limitations on what can be achieved but it doesn’t block innovation out of hand. So if you have ideas that could deliver a better consumer experience, do reach out to us.
And similarly, you may have heard, that following progress by the Financial Conduct Authority with their work on crypto assets, at the Commission we have started conversations with our Industry Forum about this. We are looking at what a potential path forward would be, to create a way for crypto assets to be more easily used as a consumer payment option for licensed and regulated gambling in Great Britain. This is early days and there is nothing more to say right now but it is something we are exploring.
There is then, as always, plenty going on in gambling. And as we’ve previously done, at the Commission, we think there is real scope in working with many of you on how we take things forward. And in that spirit, with the time remaining I’d be very happy to take a few questions.
Thank you.
Last updated: 20 May 2026
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