The International Betting Integrity Association (IBIA) anti-corruption organization has announced its publication of a new set of standards designed to govern the way their membership collates data related to land-based and online sportsbetting.

Formerly known as ESSA Sports Betting Integrity, the group used an official Tuesday press release (pdf) to detail that it has also begun a campaign to be conducted by the United Kingdom’s eCommerce Online Gaming Regulation and Assurance (eCOGRA) testing agency that will allow interested parties to demonstrate their compliance with these fresh rules.

Topical treatment:

The IBIA declared that it ‘represents many of the leading regulated sportsbetting operators in the world’ and had recently grown concerned regarding ‘the adverse impact of the manipulation of data and the related corruption of betting markets’. As such and it stated that firms passing its coming audit will be permitted to display an official ‘data standards kitemark’ so as to show they effectively protect the integrity of consumers, sports, data and betting markets generated by this information.

Supreme significance:

Khalid Ali, Chief Executive Officer for the IBIA, used the press release to describe safeguarding the credibility and reliability of sportsbetting data as ‘of paramount importance’ to his organization’s membership with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic having further highlighted ‘the necessity for robust data chains’. The regulator furthermore proclaimed that his group’s new regulations have been designed ‘to meet this integrity challenge’ so as to reflect ‘the minimum expectations of the IBIA and its members’.

Read a statement from Ali…

“The IBIA believes that data collation is an important part of the wider sportsbetting integrity debate and this standards and auditing process represents the next step in our work in this area. We call upon all parties engaged in the data collation process to demonstrate that they meet these standards and of their commitment to protecting the integrity of the global data supply chain.”