Tim Miller leaves the Gambling Commission for advisory work as UK financial risk assessments move toward full rollout

Tim Miller, the Gambling Commission’s former executive director of policy and research, has left after ten years and launched GamReg Consulting. His exit matters for PSPs and banks because the Commission is still moving from policy to full implementation on financial risk assessments (FRAs), while the broader UK regime for age checks, game design, marketing controls, and data-led harm prevention keeps tightening.

1. Miller spent a decade at the UK Gambling Commission and was closely involved in delivery of the 2023 white paper reforms, covering age verification, game design, marketing controls, financial risk checks, and the launch of the Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB).
2. He says his proudest achievement was the National Strategy to Reduce Gambling Harms, which brought the financial services sector into harm prevention and helped prompt challenger banks such as Starling to introduce gambling blocks. For payment firms, that is the useful bit: gambling-related risk management is no longer just a regulator-vs-operator issue; it now sits inside banking and transaction monitoring decisions as well.
3. Miller announced his exit in June, completed it last month, and is now running GamReg Consulting. Early clients include Gaming Compliance International (GCI), which provides transaction and market monitoring tools to regulators, and Spectrum Gaming Group. He says the reaction to the launch, including at G2E in Las Vegas recently, has been “absolutely fantastic”.
4. His departure came at a sensitive time for the Commission: chief executive Andrew Rhodes stepped down at the end of April, financial risk assessments (FRAs) were confirmed in July, and full implementation is still ahead. In other words, the policy framework is set, but the operational detail still matters for operators, PSPs, and acquiring banks that will have to work with it.
5. Miller rejects the idea that the Commission’s direction pushed him out. “I wasn’t looking to escape the Commission, I was just ready for the next challenge,” he said. He also says he never seriously considered succeeding Rhodes, arguing that the job requires “at least three years or more” and that he had already been clear he did not want that commitment.

Miller’s other message is the one compliance teams tend to file under “still true, still inconvenient”: the black market is not the regulator’s alone to fix. He compares illegal gambling to other organised criminal networks, including the international drugs trade, and says law enforcement, governments and tech companies all have to play a part. For high-risk payments people, that translates into a familiar reality: a regulator can set expectations, but it cannot clean up the market by itself.