GVC Appoints Dr. Mark Griffiths as Special Adviser on Player Protection and Safer Gambling Issues

GVC Holdings has appointed online gambling addiction specialist Dr. Mark Griffiths as a special adviser on player protection and safer gambling issues.

Dr. Mark Griffiths, Distinguished Professor of Behavioural Addiction and Psychology at Nottingham Trent University, will audit GVC’s policies and processes on responsible gaming and suggest improvements. He was a part of the World Health Organisation working party that formally recognised “gaming disorder” as a psychological condition last year.

Last week, GVC’s CEO Shay Segev set out his direction for the Group, focusing on two strategic pillars of sustainability and growth, underpinned by the Group’s industry-leading proprietary technology. This included a commitment, under the new Sustainability Charter, to continue to lead the industry on responsible gambling.

A core part of this is the launch of the Advanced Responsibility & Care (ARC) programme. The ARC programme encompasses scientific analysis of player behaviour to inform the enhancement of player protections. GVC’s data scientists then derive predictive models and analytics to score players for potential indicators of protection. Each player has a dynamic risk rating aligned to their play patterns and other criteria to enable real-time monitoring and analysis tools to enable early interventions to improve player protection.

Professor Griffiths’ work will be instrumental in delivering ARC. He will work with the business to apply findings from the behaviours of over 160 million players on GVC’s global database to help develop stronger rules, measures and interventions. He will also draw on GVC’s existing multi-million-dollar partnership with Harvard Medical School, now two years into a five-year study into addiction.