The UK gambling landscape is shifting on multiple fronts, and the regulator wants the sector to be ready. In a keynote at the International Association of Gaming Regulators (IAGR) Conference, UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) chief executive Andrew Rhodes set out how participation, technology, and consumer behaviour are converging — and why crypto and illegal markets are moving up the agenda.

Three complementary accounts of his remarks and the Commission’s follow-on publications paint a consistent picture: data-driven supervision is tightening, upstream enforcement continues to expand, and the timeline for crypto-related decisions is accelerating.

Market shape, digital habits, and AI’s growing footprint

Rhodes’ prepared text describes a mature market with steady engagement: participation “is stable at around 48 per cent of the adult population,” with the whole GB market “valued at about £15.6 billion and £11.5 billion of that is the size of the market once we exclude lotteries.” Remote gambling “will be £6.9 billion… 60 per cent of the whole shape of our market, once we exclude lotteries,” and “online casino games, particularly slots dominate the remote sector with £4.4 billion in 23/24.”

He links these figures to broader digital behaviour — “95 per cent of adults have the Internet at home… People average over 4 hours online a day, 75 per cent of which is on smartphones” — and notes that operators now deploy generative AI to standardise safer-gambling interactions.

Rhodes cautions against “hyper personalisation,” warning regulators and licensees to balance relevance with intensity. He also points to a sharp rise in enforcement: “year on year we saw a 300 per cent increase in the number of criminal cases we were taking as a regulator.”

The most urgent strategic theme is crypto. Operators licensed in Great Britain do not offer crypto gambling, yet Rhodes acknowledges that in the illegal market it is “widespread,” especially among under-40s whose financial lives increasingly include digital assets. What once looked distant now looms soon: the question of whether — and how — crypto fits the licensed environment is “maybe 12 months, 24 months away.”

He frames the core difficulty plainly: traceability, AML and terrorist-financing risks, and source-of-wealth checks are challenging without traditional financial records. As he puts it in his speech, “these are going to be governmental level questions… not… questions for individual gambling regulators,” but the pressure “is definitely not going to go away.”

Illegal market disruption and fairness for consumers

Rhodes details an upstream strategy to blunt illegal supply. A dedicated illegal-gambling team reports close to 200,000 URLs to search engines in the current financial year and tracks the traffic impact across more than 1,000 illicit operators. “There is nothing more exploitative than the illegal market,” he says, underscoring why the Commission also engages B2B suppliers to cut off game content to unlicensed sites.

On licensed-market fairness, the Commission’s data show that withdrawals overwhelmingly clear fast — of 44.2 million withdrawals between June and September 2024, “96.3 per cent is cleared automatically,” 3.5% within 24 hours, and only 0.1% beyond 48 hours.

The Commission is scrutinising that 0.1% to understand justified delays (e.g., AML or identity checks) versus avoidable friction. Account restrictions are another flashpoint: over a 12-month period, 4.31% of accounts were restricted for commercial reasons, with many of those customers in profit; stake-factoring to extremely low permitted stakes is common. Rhodes links these patterns to the “hybrid arrangement” some consumers adopt — using both licensed and unlicensed operators — and calls for a deeper understanding of drivers and risks.

The Commission’s Regular feed of Operator Core Data (ROCD) is expanding near-real-time visibility into behaviour trends. Early findings: under-25s are least likely to set deposit limits yet most likely to hit risk triggers, and operators often set limits for them as a result.

A pilot for financial risk assessments using credit-reference data has, in a “frictionless way,” identified high-spending customers and their correlates of harm: those spending most were “between two and four times as likely to have a debt management plan” and “between two and five times more likely to have a debt default in the last 12 months.” For Rhodes, this validates targeting interventions where risk concentrates, while continuing debate on proportionality and consumer freedom.

Complementing the keynote, the UKGC has published new Evidence Roadmaps that translate broad evidence themes into concrete research priorities supported by the forthcoming statutory levy. The roadmaps, shaped with researchers, policymakers, lived-experience voices, and industry, are designed to guide longer-term, collaborative studies — including potential longitudinal work — and to align with the Commission’s strategy and licensing objectives.

Rhodes closed with a call for practical cooperation among regulators: insight-sharing, coordinated disruption of illegal channels, and common approaches to technology-driven risks. As he put it, “Find something this week, with another regulator that you can work on together… because you won’t regret it.”