Ampersand London Assembly 2019 focuses on key UK gambling industry issues

Ampersand is Clarion Gaming’s “global think-tank initiative”, a free-to-join research and knowledge sharing initiative for the global gaming industry. Over 2,000 industry professionals participate in regular Ampersand online surveys and meetings, share best practice and learn from one another.

David Clifton attended the Ampersand London Assembly on 30 October 2019. He is pictured below (on the right) speaking during one of the discussion sessions:

As reported subsequently by Clarion Gaming, the top 3 most important topics as voted by the participants were:

1. How does the industry plan to adapt for the next generation?

A constant in our Ampersand discussions, but the point was made that shouldn’t that actually be the question that the industry keeps asking itself? The industry however doesn’t actually know or understand the younger audiences – its future players, and not necessarily genuinely trying to understand them as they’re busy making good money now. It’s once again a short-term vs. long-term view issue.

2. Dialogue, or lack of it, between regulators and the industry. How can the industry best respond to a regulator that appears to hate gambling?

While it would certainly help if there was a better and constant dialogue, what we have to understand as an industry is that regulators respond to politicians, not the industry. Politicians respond to voters, i.e. consumers, so that they get elected. Current consumer narrative is against gambling and the industry needs to ask itself why consumers have turned against them now – the industry needs to perform a ‘mea culpa’ and understand how to regain the trust of the consumer. Gambling being gambling, it’s a difficult if not an impossible task, but perhaps short term financial goals should be sacrificed a little bit to achieve a long-term sustainability.

3. Operational excellence under tight regulation.

Regulation is becoming stricter and stricter – can the industry continue achieving its financial success? The technology developments allow for better understanding of the player and therefore for better personalisation – it is indeed in true understanding of the player and their emotional/experiential triggers where the secret lies.

The Clarion Gaming report on the Ampersand London Assembly (published on 31 October 2019) can be downloaded below.