René Jansen Comments on the Recent Changes in the Netherlands Market at Holland Conference

At the recently held annual conference of Gaming in Holland, René Jansen, a Chairman of the Gaming Authority (Ksa), gave a speech in which, among other things, he discussed the potential banning of untargeted ads for online games of chance.

Safety as the major priority:

The Ksa is aware of the issue, and they want the process to be as smooth as possible. The ban is set to begin on July 1st, and the authority decided not to go with the strict enforcement of it immediately. They’ll rather talk to the impacted affiliates and providers and check how the changes work out and if there’s any space left for implementing additional changes. However, the Ksa will continue to advocate to maintain the confidence in the industry on high levels and impact the providers not to push the boundaries they have.

Online games of chance were legalized in the Netherlands a year and a half ago. Since then, many providers still haven’t established their Control Database, so their data isn’t completely safe yet. The other major task for Ksa is to monitor these implementations, now more strictly than before. As Jansen stated, the established Control Database is one of the key things if they want the market to be completely safe and secure.

The KSA continues fighting against the potential harms in the industry, so they recently put their efforts into researching the duty of care, as well as its implementation among the providers. The results of this major research will be published during the summer.

Improvements to increase confidence:

One of the requirements for providers is to add their own values and measures to improve the overall process, so the implementation might be very different for each provider. Jansen called the providers to do everything they do with one thing in mind: safe gaming must be a priority, and all of the actions need to align with common sense.

The confidence in the sector must be restored, as Jansen says. It means that many challenges lie in front of providers, but changes must be conducted in order to establish a safe and secure environment for both providers and players. 

On the other hand, the online gambling market in the Netherlands is fine so far, as it’s written in the monitoring report that was recently published. The license owners are highly responsible for that. Jensen said that it’s a responsibility of both individual providers and the whole sector.