Black Friday proved that operators need to minimise the negative impact of events that are hard to predict. Garth Kimber from the Isle of Man government explains to Jenni Shuttleworth what role a jurisdiction can play in this

Player protection is considered to be one of the most important parts of regulation on the Isle of Man. The matter is so important in fact, that the regulator is on record as saying it needs as much attention from regulators as gambling addiction and underage gambling does.

So it comes as a surprise that it isn't on the priority list of all jurisdictions, especially considering the events that ocurred on April 15 this year. Black Friday may have made the issue of player protection topical, but what it hasn't done yet is make any jurisdiction come out and say that they are changing the way they do things.

Speaking to iNTERGAMINGi, Garth Kimber, head of egaming development at the Isle of Man government's department of economic development, said: “What makes player protection topical is firstly the question 'are regulators regulating?' Or are they just trying to build big businesses in their jurisdictions? Because if they're really regulating, surely they've got to protect the players' funds.”

He continued: “I think player protection is important and that's why the Isle of Man has always had regulation in two different government departments. Not only do we not all work together, but I work under the department of economic development and Steve Brennan and his team are now an independent statutory body that nominally goes through treasury rather than the department of economic development. So they've got real independence. I could say 'I want to bring the biggest company in the world here', but if that company didn't want to segregate players' funds, the Gambling Commission has a perfect right to say 'you might be creating 500 Isle of Man jobs, but we're still not allowing it to happen'.”

The Isle of Man has always had player protection in place through independent trusts and bank guarantees, but since early last year, it is now able to bring in the protection through client accounts. “We had that nearly a year before Black Friday occurred, so that was the proof of the pudding that it works,” said Kimber.

Previously to that, player funds could be protected by two methods. The first was that the Gambling Commission would need to see a bank guarantee from any licence holder. The other way to do things was to segregate players' funds into another account and then have that looked after by a board of independent trustees who would only release out of that account the interest on the account and the profit after a period of gambling. That, however, made the Isle of Man as a jurisdiction quite expensive when compared to jurisdictions that didn't enforce this sort of thing, so it passed a law to introduce a new system that effectively treated a separate player account as the equivalent of a client account with a lawyer or a corporate service provider that was moving money about on behalf of customers.