Report
Consumers' views on informed choice in gambling
Findings from a research project to explore how consumers understand the meaning of “informed choice” in gambling.
5 - Conclusions
Cross-cutting themes and next steps
A related theme concerns protections that already exist. Several of the concerns participants raised, and solutions they proposed, are already provided for in the statement of principles or have been addressed by recent rule changes: free-play modes to learn game mechanics, prompts to set deposit limits, session and spend displays, caps on wagering requirements, and signposted routes to support. That participants experienced these as absent or proposed them as new ideas is itself a finding. The gap lies less in the existence of protections than in consumers knowing where to look, choosing to engage, and understanding what these protections mean, reinforcing the disconnect described above and suggesting that awareness, positioning and comprehension of existing tools should be a priority for future work.
There is a disconnect between information being available and consumers feeling informed. At every stage of the journey, participants described situations where information existed on the platform but did not translate into a sense of being genuinely informed. The reasons varied from terms and conditions being too long and difficult to understand, to likelihood of profit or loss being displayed in formats that were hard to interpret, to net spend appearing in inconsistent locations, or safer gambling tools taking too much effort to find. Participants' experience of informed choice depended less on whether information had been provided and more on whether they could find it, understand it, and use it at the point where it mattered. This distinction between provision and comprehension is one that broader financial sectors have increasingly built into their statement of principles. For example, the Financial Conduct Authority's (FCA) Consumer Duty (opens in new tab) requires firms to demonstrate that customers understand what they are being told, rather than simply that the information was made available. This research suggests that for many gambling consumers, this requirement is not always met.
Participants' accounts suggest practices that undermine good and fair outcomes. Consumers who cannot interpret wagering requirements, who wager on outcomes that turn out to be unfeasible, who cannot verify a payout, or whose stakes change without clear notification may end up worse off simply because the information available to them did not support a good decision. Ensuring that consumers can make genuinely informed choices therefore supports the Gambling Commission's broader 'fair and open' licensing objective alongside its work on harm prevention.
In relation to responsibility, participants favoured a shared model in which consumers, gambling companies, and regulators each play a role. But this general position was not evenly held across the Path to Play. Before gambling, participants were more comfortable with personal responsibility, provided information was visible and accessible. During play, particularly in fast-paced or immersive contexts, they were more open to the idea that gambling companies should intervene on their behalf, whether through pop-ups, comprehension checks, or personalised alerts. Post-play outcome, some looked beyond the operator entirely, suggesting that banks or a central tracking body might be better placed to provide oversight of total gambling spend. This variation suggests that the question of where responsibility should sit does not have a single answer. It depends on the stage of the journey, the type of product, and the consumer's capacity in the moment.
Participants consistently distinguished between information or interventions that felt relevant to them and those that felt generic. Generic messaging was frequently described as easy to ignore, and in some cases actively counterproductive. By contrast, participants engaged more readily with information tied to their own behaviour: their spending data, prompts triggered by changes in their play patterns, or confirmations specific to the bet they were about to place. This is consistent with the experimental literature reviewed in the desk review, which found larger effects from personalised interventions than from generic ones. At the same time, the qualitative work surfaced a tension that the experimental literature does not fully address. Participants wanted gambling companies to use behavioural data to support them, but some simultaneously expressed distrust of gambling companies' motives for collecting that data. The same tracking capability that enables a helpful intervention also enables targeted marketing. How this tension is navigated has implications for any framework that relies on personalised information provision.
There is variation across product types. Sport bettors, casino game players, and land-based gamblers described quite different relationships with information throughout the journey. Sport bettors arrived with a specific goal and experienced interruptions as a hindrance; their needs centred on accuracy, feasibility, and post-bet confirmation. Casino game players faced a wider and less familiar range of products and needed accessible explanations, consistent displays, and active interventions during immersive play. Land-based players operated in an environment where formal information provision was largely absent and the social and physical dynamics of the venue shaped the experience in ways without a direct online equivalent. These differences were apparent not just in what information participants wanted but in when and how they wanted to receive it, and in how they responded to the same types of intervention.
Moving forward, we recommend that the Commission uses these findings in order to conduct a behavioural mapping exercise and translate the concept of informed choice into observable and measurable indicators. To facilitate this exercise, BIT had designed a conceptual framework, outlining practical steps the Commission can take to conduct the exercise, including: mapping the outcomes that would indicate informed choice is being achieved; for each outcome, identifying the specific behaviours that must occur for the outcome to be achieved; noting who contributes to enabling each behaviour; mapping all the potential identified facilitators (and barriers) that could impact the desired behaviour; and evaluating these facilitators according to their impact, feasibility and measurability. All these can be done while identifying metrics or indicators to evaluate the targeted behaviour and test the effectiveness of the facilitators in influencing that behaviour.
Previous sectionInformed choice - Qualitative research findings Next section
Informed choice - Appendices
Last updated: 15 September 2026
Show updates to this content
No changes to show.