A quarter would trigger the UK’s gambling financial risk check, study finds

A new study has found that roughly one in four UK online gamblers would have triggered the financial risk checks introduced by the UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) earlier this year – and that group accounts for the vast majority of all money spent on gambling.

The research, published in the journal Public Health and previewed at Science Direct, analysed 12 months of bank transaction data from more than 243,000 UK-based gamblers. Its goal was to build a picture of who would be caught by the new rules, giving regulators and operators a baseline to work from.

What are the new financial risk checks?

From February 2025, any online gambling operator licensed in the UK must carry out a financial risk check when a customer exceeds a net loss of £150 within any rolling 30-day period. 

The checks are designed to be light-touch. Operators are expected to look at things like whether someone is subject to bankruptcy orders or has significant outstanding debts, rather than demanding full financial disclosures up front.

Where a check raises concerns, operators are expected to act on that by looking into it further. This could mean players needing to provide documentation in some cases. However, the intention is that most players will pass through the process without any noticeable impact on their experience.

The policy sits within a broader package of reforms outlined in the UKGC’s 2023 white paper, which aimed to modernise consumer protections across the industry.

What did the study actually find?

The headline figure is that around 24% of gamblers in the dataset would have hit the threshold. This is slightly more than the UKGC’s own estimate of 20%, which was based on a slightly lower threshold of £125. The fact that a higher financial threshold still caught more people than expected is one of the more striking findings in the paper.

That 24% also accounted for approximately 92% of total gambling expenditure across the entire dataset. In practical terms, a relatively small proportion of players are responsible for almost all the money flowing into gambling operators – and it’s that group the new rules are targeting.

Those who exceeded the threshold were more likely to be male and younger, and showed significantly higher levels of gambling activity overall. On average, gamblers in the full dataset spent just over £1,800 on gambling across the 12-month study period, though the median was far lower at £108, reflecting just how skewed the distribution is towards a smaller group of heavy spenders.

For this study, the authors used large-scale data from open banking, a technology that allows customers to securely share their banking information with third-party apps and services. Unlike data held by a single operator, which only captures what a customer does on that one platform, bank transaction data shows the full picture of someone’s gambling activity across multiple sites. As of 2025, open banking has over 13 million active users in the UK, up from roughly 1 in 17 consumers in early 2021.

That rapid growth seems to have also impacted online gambling behaviour. Many players are now choosing to use bank transfer as their primary deposit method, whereas it was previously used only as a method of last resort. This insight, shared by the UK bank transfer casino specialist site Bank Transfer Casino UK, shows just how reliable open banking data can be.

Not all high spenders are problem gamblers

Perhaps the most important nuance in the study is what the data revealed when researchers looked more closely at those who exceeded the threshold.

Using cluster analysis, they identified three distinct subgroups within this population. Around half fell into what the researchers called “diversified spenders” – people whose gambling expenditure appeared proportionate to their income and sat alongside other normal spending like eating out or travel. For this group, being flagged by the £150 threshold may not reflect any underlying financial vulnerability at all.

The other subgroups showed patterns more consistent with potential financial risk, which is precisely the kind of behaviour the policy is designed to catch.

This matters because it confirms that the checks will capture a genuinely mixed population. Someone spending £200 a month on gambling while earning a good salary is a very different situation from someone spending the same amount while struggling to cover essential costs – but the threshold alone can’t tell the difference.

What this means for policy going forward

The study stops short of saying anything categorical about the policy, although the data supports the idea that it effectively identifies a high-risk population. Those who exceed the threshold really do account for most gambling spend, and the subgroup analysis shows that genuine vulnerability is present within that group.

But the findings also make a reasonable case for refining how the checks work in practice. A blanket threshold will inevitably catch people who pose no real financial risk alongside those who do. The logical next step for regulators is to explore ways to streamline the process by reducing unnecessary friction for players who are spending within their means, without losing sight of those who aren’t.

As the study itself demonstrates, open banking has considerable potential. With more than 13 million active users in the UK and growing, it’s an obvious candidate for how checks could evolve. Operators could verify the player’s financial position quickly and quietly, without the player needing to provide anything. It’s an area being explored, but for now remains a future possibility.

Furthermore, open banking hasn’t been universally adopted. Other payments are popular, and the UKGC has made it clear that mandating open banking is not on the agenda. Any future solution will need to work equally well for players across all payment methods – and that’s arguably the harder problem to solve.