Michel Groothuizen: “Forse boete legale aanbieder na overtreding reclameregels”

Speech by Michel Groothuizen

KKF / IMGL, 17 January 2024, De Industrieele Groote Club, Amsterdam

Good evening everyone. Thank you for inviting me to speak here, Justin. It’s wonderful that this event is still being held in this beautiful location in Amsterdam, despite ICE’s move from London to Barcelona. Although I never went to ICE in London myself, my colleagues spoke enthusiastically about it. Having said so, I don’t mind ICE’s new choice of venue, especially as my weather app is predicting fine conditions in Barcelona next week.

As I’ve been in office for six months now, perhaps many of you have already seen, spoken to or heard me somewhere, even though this evening is my first time here as the chairman of Ksa – the Netherlands Gambling Authority. This is not exactly a debut, though, as I spoke at this event over 10 years ago in my role as policy director at the Ministry of Justice. A lot has happened since then. That won’t surprise you, as there never seems to be a dull moment in the gambling world.

I don’t expect smooth sailing in 2025 either. We already witnessed a flurry of developments impacting the Dutch gambling landscape in 2024. On the political front, over 15 motions that affected our market were put on the table: for a total ban on advertising, for reversing legalisation, for abolishing the 24-hour opening of physical establishments, and so much more. In terms of regulations, we introduced the Administrative Rule on Responsible Gambling. Programme sponsorship came to an end, and the Ministry introduced mandatory contact when excessively high playing limits are set. And there was much ado about the announced increase in gambling tax, which already took partial effect on 1 January.

All these issues hit the market hard; I understand that. We’ve repeatedly expressed our concerns about various developments over the past year, including the risks of increasing gambling tax. As a market supervisor, I’m well aware that a licensed market is nothing without businesses willing to operate in it. In 2024, we already saw two parties leave the market, arguing that it had become too unattractive, partly due to the prospect of tax hikes. A significant number of physical operators, in particular, are expected to face problems due to this increase. As the regulator, we’re not turning a blind eye to this and are monitoring what these measures mean for the market and their effect on channelization.

However, speaking out about the importance of a licensed market doesn’t mean I always find our market worth defending. That might sound harsh, but the political anti-gambling sentiment doesn’t come out of nowhere. Even in 2024, we continue to hear accounts of significant losses without meaningful interventions from operators who have a duty of care. We announced the first multimillion fine for a violation of the Anti-Money Laundering and Anti-Terrorist Financing Act, and we also imposed hefty fines for allowing players registered on CRUKS – our national central register of persons excluded from gambling – and for advertising aimed at young adults.

Perhaps I was being a little naive, but I’d hoped to hand out fines to illegal parties only. Gambling legislation features many norms open to interpretation that we’re continuing to tighten from various angles. The legislator has, also quite naively, assumed that market parties would wholeheartedly act against their own business model. I don’t think you can fault a wolf for preying on endearing lambs, but if you want to prevent blood and gore, you need to ensure there’s a high fence between the wolf and the flock. A mere chalk line on the ground and wishful thinking isn’t enough. So it’s up to politicians, but partly also to us as regulators, to be more explicit about precisely what we expect and to ensure a sufficiently high, sturdy fence. Because the safety of the player remains paramount.

Supervision agenda

That brings me straight to my priorities for 2025. This month, we presented our new Supervision Agenda, outlining where we’ll focus extra attention in this new year. The Ksa sees additional risks in the areas of minors and young adults, the duty of care, combating illegal offerings, and advertising. To minimise these risks as much as possible, we’ll intensify our efforts on these topics.

Minors

When it comes to minors, we’re focusing on a crucial question: how is it possible that minors gamble, even with legal operators? We’re hearing more and more about this, and I don’t need to tell you how worrying this trend is. In this context, we’re going to focus more on prevention and education for this target group, but we’re also taking a closer look at the registration process with a market-wide survey. If this survey pinpoints registration issues and not identity fraud as the problem, we might need to further tighten the rules around online registration. We also want to know what drives this group to gamble, and what temptations they’re exposed to. This is something we’ll investigate further this year.

Duty of care

The duty of care was already one of our focus points in 2024 and will remain so in 2025. The new Online Duty of Care unit has been established to act decisively with swift interventions, alongside long-term investigations into duty-of-care malpractices. The unit has already had several conversations with operators about matters we find undesirable or would like to see done differently, and we’re fortunately seeing that practices are being immediately adjusted after these conversations. That’s also what I want to focus on more: directly addressing undesirable behaviour in order to end this as quickly as possible. We want a constructive collaborative relationship, especially with our licence holders. That includes clearly showing what we think compliant behaviour should look like and dedication on your side. If you feel we’re asking for something extremely unreasonable, we’d like to hear that too, of course. Perhaps more roads lead to Rome sometimes.

Anyhow, based on the first conversations, we’re finding that this approach is having a positive effect, and we’ll therefore continue this in the new year. In 2025, we’ll also be issuing guidelines for the implementation of the duty of care by land-based operators. No new requirements, just clarification on how existing regulations must be implemented.

I’d like to emphasise here that compliance with the duty of care is a priority because we still see far too much going wrong here. This is also one of the main conclusions from last year’s evaluation of the Remote Betting and Gambling Act. Despite all the problems you’re already facing as a sector, you’ll really need to step up your game here. Some of you are already doing so, as we’ve seen doing research on how the new policy rule Responsible Gambling has been implemented. For example, some operators do not allow young adults to deposit more than the €300 limit, no matter their income. I applaud that, and it sets a great example for the rest.

I try to explain to politicians that this duty of care is something that business owners naturally need to get used to and that you can’t expect everyone to score high marks from day one onwards. However, many politicians (including those from governing parties) have a limited understanding of this. You have little standing in the political arena of The Hague. The fact that you compete with each other on duty of care is perhaps understandable (if you consider the instinctive behaviour of a wolf near a pasture of lambs), but it is also entirely unacceptable. Because while we do see some best practices, we’ve also come across very bad practices when it comes to the policy rule. In my opinion, you can’t decide on someone’s income when you haven’t received any proof of where the money comes from. The safety of players and the prevention of gambling-related harm must always be your top priority too. If you stray from that, we will take strong action.

Illegal market

Besides the increasing regulations and gambling tax hike that I mentioned earlier, there’s another issue threatening the legal market – the growth of the illegal market. I hear your concerns about this growth and also see that the channelization figures, especially when we look at the gross gambling result, show a decline. This means that ‘big’ players are more likely to switch to illegal operators as we regulate more strictly. I’m not blind to this development. I also see illegal parties becoming increasingly brazen. Since taking office, I've regularly spoken out about the scandalous marketing techniques these charlatans use, for example with the much-discussed suicide ads.

I've been trying to brush up on my Italian a bit using Duolingo. If you use the free version of this app, you have to watch regular ads. Imagine my surprise a few weeks ago when I was suddenly confronted with this awful ad myself between two exercises. This kind of repugnant behaviour must stop immediately, and I’m committed to take assholes down. We’re not only tackling the illegal operators themselves but also all their accomplices, promoters, hosting parties and payment service operators. The conversations we’re having with Google and Meta, among others, will continue: it must not become easier to find illegal parties than our own licence holders’ websites. For now, I trust that the winds of change in America won’t throw a spanner in the works.

We see tens of thousands of illegal operators worldwide. Every month, we draw up a list of the top 100 that have a players base in the Netherlands. While the larger operators are few and far between, there is a seemingly never-ending series of smaller ones. As one disappears or is tackled, the next one immediately pops up. The task of tackling illegal offerings is therefore too big for us as the Ksa alone. Precisely because illegal offerings are often located outside our national borders, it’s important to continue joining forces on this issue. We’re intensifying cooperation with other regulators, and I intend to look at concerted action in enforcement with my international colleagues. And when I talk about joining forces, that includes you. I believe we share an interest here, so keep informing us about abuses and bad actors. You often know more than we do. You are aware of what goes on in practice. As our recent and incredibly valuable conversations have already shown, we’re stronger when we stand together.

Advertising

Our fourth priority is advertising. A lot has already been said about this to you in recent years, by politicians and by my predecessor: don’t push the boundaries. You’re responsible for the image people and especially politicians, policymakers and media have of the market, so stick to the rules. I wish I could say that all these messages have had an effect, but there’s hardly any sign of that. We’ve again seen quite a few violations of the advertising ban in the past year. Given the nature of the violations, we’ve mostly dealt with them through warnings, after which they’ve immediately stopped, but that doesn’t mean the situation will remain this way. We’re going to crack down harder on parties that push the boundaries again and have also imposed a hefty fine on a licence holder that will probably be made public one of these days. Don’t get me wrong, there are also parties that play by the rules. As far as I’m concerned, this underscores that the time for tolerance has passed. The rules for operators to follow are now sufficiently clear.

New fine policy

In addition to the priorities for 2025, some aspects of our supervision are also changing. For instance, we’ve had a new policy on fines since 1 January, with which we aim to provide more clarity to all parties under our supervision. Although this means that fines will be more uniform, they may also be higher in the future. Hopefully, this will motivate you even more to avoid them from now on! In this context, we’re also going a step further with warnings: parties that receive an official warning from us will now be publicly named to give the warning greater weight.

New licences

Despite my possibly somewhat stern words, I assume most of you want to continue operating in the Dutch market after 2025. While I’ve seen two operators leaving, new licence holders were also added last year. This year, we’ll be working on the first licences under the Remote Betting and Gambling Act that expire in 2026. We’ll consider past performances, both positive and negative, in that licensing process. We’re shaping this process together with you: we’ve already had our first chats with law firms and licensees. That way, we can take your experiences into account and shape an efficient and fast process, while hoping to avoid massive amounts of paperwork and long run through times. I can imagine there are parties that want to adjust their licence or want to expand, for example. To those parties, I say: there’s a lot to do, so don’t leave everything to the last minute!

Conscious of time, I heard that you can ask me any pressing questions you have after my speech and that dinner is waiting, so I’m going to wrap up now. I’ll do that by going back to the beginning: I understand that 2024 was a turbulent year and that challenging times also lie ahead for 2025. I can’t promise you that 2024 and 2025 will relate to each other like London and Barcelona and that sunshine will follow after rain. But I can say that you partly hold the reins. Raising the policy bar happens for a reason. As an operator in 2025, keep putting the player first. I wish you all a wonderful new year!