Measures such as affordability checks and formal financial vulnerability assessments are not mandated for gamblers in South Africa. Photo: File
South African gambling regulators and industry leaders face a pressing question: as global best practices evolve, are we doing enough to monitor gambling behaviour and intervene early to prevent harm? In countries such as the United Kingdom, Sweden and Canada, regulators have adopted data-driven strategies to spot problem gambling before it spirals.
The UK, for instance, is rolling out “affordability” checks — automated flags when a customer’s spending exceeds modest monthly thresholds (￡500, dropping to ￡150) — to ensure players aren’t betting beyond their means.
South Africa is not blind to this trend. We were early pioneers in some areas of responsible gambling, and several protective measures are already mandated. Self-exclusion programmes, for one, are written into law — the National Gambling Board (NGB) is required to maintain a register of people who admit they have a gambling problem and opt out of gambling venues.
Every casino and betting operator in the country offers self-exclusion to patrons, and contributions of 0.1% of gross gaming revenue fund the South African Responsible Gambling Foundation (SARGF) to support treatment and prevention programmes.
Additionally, all licensed gambling operators must display prominent responsible gambling messaging. It is no accident that every betting advertisement or casino billboard carries the tagline and helpline number — regulations demand that all gambling advertising include prescribed warnings about the risks. Inside venues, signage and brochures urge moderation (“Winners know when to stop”) and provide information on getting help.
Frontline staff training is another cornerstone: through the gambling foundation, casino employees and betting shop cashiers receive training on how to identify and assist problem gamblers. These courses teach staff to recognise warning signs — from frantic behaviour to emotional distress — and to intervene tactfully, for example by suggesting a break or providing helpline details. Such human oversight is a vital safety net on gambling floors.
Moreover, South Africa has used technology for oversight in certain sectors. The best example is the National Central Electronic Monitoring System (NCEMS), which links every limited payout machine — the small-scale slot machines found in bars and arcades — to a central database. The NCEMS, mandated by the National Gambling Act, allows regulators to track each machine’s usage and detect significant events in real time. This ensures, at a minimum, that tampering or unusually high payouts on limited payout machines are flagged immediately, and it provides a wealth of data on gambling patterns in that sector. The system has been lauded as “technologically-advanced” and was recently upgraded to improve efficiency and support for the industry. It shows that South Africa can successfully implement nationwide monitoring systems — at least for machines.
For all these efforts, South Africa has not yet fully embraced the newest wave of proactive, data-driven interventions that characterise global best practice.
Our regulations still lean on a mostly reactive model — providing help once a gambler seeks it or after problems become visible — rather than systematically using data to spot trouble early. Unlike in the UK or Ontario, no South African law compels online betting companies to use behavioural analytics to flag players who exhibit risky patterns (such as sudden increases in bet frequency, chasing losses, or playing for marathon sessions late at night).
In fact, current national policy guidelines on responsible gambling have remained “fairly broad and static for over 20 years”, leaving it largely to operators to formulate their own policies for detecting problem play. Some forward-thinking operators do use algorithms to identify at-risk customers, but this is a voluntary practice, not a regulatory requirement. The result is that a person’s ability to receive timely help may depend on which operator they happen to use.
Critically, South Africa does not mandate affordability checks or any formal financial vulnerability assessments for gamblers. A person can lose large sums across multiple betting platforms without any automated trigger to check if they might be spending beyond their means. By contrast, Britain’s regulator has begun introducing financial risk checks at modest levels to identify “significant financial vulnerability” early in a customer’s play. Here, aside from standard credit checks for account opening (mainly aimed at anti-money-laundering compliance), there is no systemic review of a gambler’s financial situation.
The onus is on individuals to know their limits — a principle that works well for most, but tragically fails those in the grip of addiction.
Perhaps the most glaring shortcoming is the absence of a unified national framework for online gambling safety. Because online casino-style gambling remains technically illegal (aside from online sports betting with provincial bookmaker licenses), South Africa lacks the kind of cohesive national strategy that many countries have developed for internet gambling. There is no equivalent of Sweden’s Spelpaus or the UK’s GamStop — a single database that online operators must check and adhere to for self-excluded players. Instead, each province oversees its licensed betting sites, and self-exclusion is fragmented.
A problem gambler barred from, say, a Gauteng betting app can relatively easily sign up at a different site licensed in the Western Cape. Provincial regulators do share some information, but there is no centralised, real-time system to enforce a self-exclusion or cooling-off period across all platforms. As a Western Cape regulator candidly observed recently, it is “difficult to implement responsible gaming measures such as self-exclusion” under the current siloed setup — a player excluded in one province may simply continue betting in another. In other words, the safety net has holes: a national online self-exclusion registry with teeth is still missing.
The lack of a unified approach extends beyond self-exclusion. Standards for online responsible gambling tools — things like mandatory deposit limits, reality check pop-up messages or automatic time-outs after long play sessions — are not consistently imposed across all operators. One betting website might voluntarily offer a suite of limit-setting options, while another might do the bare minimum. The National Responsible Gambling Programme provides guidelines, but without updated regulations, these remain recommendations rather than obligations.
All these developments point in one direction. South Africa’s regulatory framework is at a crossroads, evolving from a traditional focus on counselling and voluntary limits towards a more technologically empowered, preventive approach.
The challenge now is to accelerate this shift. We do not have to reinvent the wheel — we can adapt proven strategies from abroad while accounting for local realities. For example, operators could adopt algorithms that detect when a punter’s betting patterns suddenly change for the worse (such as rapid-fire bets in the middle of the night, or a sharp increase in weekly spend), and then intervene with tailored messages or temporary account freezes.
Mduduzi Mbiza is the founder and director of Izmu, an online platform promoting responsible gambling education in South Africa.