UK Gambling Commission to Require Financial Risk Checks for High-Spending Online Bettors

The UK Gambling Commission has set out a new regime that will require financial risk assessments for online gamblers who hit certain spending thresholds. For high-risk PSPs and acquiring teams, the important bit is simple: the regulator is moving credit-data-based checks closer to the payment flow, starting with the biggest bettors and then lowering the bar.

1. Players who spend more than £1,000 in online gambling within 24 hours, or more than £3,000 over 90 consecutive days, will have to undergo a financial risk assessment. Under-25s will face lower thresholds, with the final target set at £750 in 24 hours for that age group in the UK.
2. The assessments will be based on information from credit agencies, but the Commission said they are not traditional creditworthiness checks. In practice, that matters because the regulator is trying to frame this as a risk-screening exercise rather than a hard underwriting gate.
3. The rollout will be gradual and the regulator has not fixed an exact date for the full changes. The first phase starts this summer and applies only to over-25s betting more than £5,000 in 24 hours, and only at the biggest betting companies. The Commission said that initial phase will affect less than 0.5% of customers.
4. Over time, the threshold will fall to £1,000 in 24 hours, or £750 for under-25s. The Commission said the policy is meant to catch customers showing signs of financial strain without waiting for gambling operators to identify the problem on their own.
5. Sarah Gardner, the Commission’s interim chief executive, said most customers will never need an assessment, and those who do will go through a simple process with no document submission and no impact on their credit score. She also pointed to a 2023 UK gambling review that had already recommended stronger controls for customers with very high losses.

The regulator also cited evidence that high-spending bettors are between two and four times more likely to have a debt management plan, and between two and five times more likely to have defaulted in the last year, compared with the general population. A 2024 Great Britain gambling survey found that 9.3% of adults who gamble online, excluding lotteries, scored eight or more on the Problem Gambling Severity Index, which tops out at 27.

For the industry, the useful detail is that this is not a theoretical consultation note. The UK is defining a payment-linked trigger for customer monitoring, and it is doing it in phases. That is the sort of thing PSPs, acquirers, and merchant compliance teams need to map against onboarding, transaction monitoring, and escalation workflows before the thresholds come down again.