Self exclusion in iGaming is moving from tick box to trust
October 20, 2025

Self exclusion in iGaming is moving from tick box to trust

In iGaming, self-exclusion has long been seen as the industry’s safety net – the switch a player can flip when the game stops feeling fun. Yet in practice, that safety net often ends at a national border. One click later, a player can reopen an account elsewhere, bypassing the very system designed to protect them. National schemes work well within their borders, but online gambling ignores borders entirely. Players can move between jurisdictions faster than regulators can respond.

That reality has pushed Šimon Vincze, Head of Sustainable and Safer Gambling at Casino Guru, to start asking harder questions about what accountability really looks like. In an exclusive interview with SiGMA News, Šimon reflects on how trust, education, and cultural awareness could turn self-exclusion from a stop button into a shared sense of responsibility across iGaming.

 

Trust, transparency and perception

“Operators can’t get away with what they could before,” he says. “People talk, leave reviews, and expose bad practice. Accountability is becoming unavoidable.”

Yet despite more oversight and louder conversation, responsible gambling still struggles with stigma. Many players see it as a message meant for others, for “addicts” or those who “can’t handle gambling,” rather than as a framework for everyone.

Together, these shifts point to a deeper issue: trust. Until safety messaging speaks to every player, not just those in crisis, accountability will remain reactive instead of relational.

Four years ago, Casino Guru launched its Global Self-Exclusion System, designed to fill the gaps left by national schemes.

“National systems do a great job,” Vincze explains, “but people can go around them. There is no way for an operator to know if someone has been self-excluded.”

Without an international authority to enforce collaboration, the system relied on voluntary operator participation. That became the first obstacle.

“We had a reasonable plan,” he says, “but almost no operator would commit. Many saw more risk than benefit.”

Today, the vision remains alive, but Vincze is candid about where things stand.

“There are no active regulator discussions at the moment,” he admits.

“The real impact will come from offshore regulators, but shared self-exclusion schemes are still at the bottom of their priority list.”

It’s a sober assessment, but an honest one. For now, the system’s potential remains on pause, waiting for the market and the politics to align. Slow progress highlights just how fragmented self-exclusion in iGaming remains.

 

From ‘responsible’ to ‘smart’ gambling

If there’s a phrase Vincze would scrap from industry vocabulary, it’s “responsible gambling”.

“Responsible gambling has become stigmatised,” he says. “Players see it and think: I don’t need this. I’m not an addict.”

He believes the conversation needs to shift from moral responsibility to personal control and awareness — from “responsible” to “smart”.

“Ideally, it becomes cool,” he says. “I’m a smart person when I gamble, I’m in control, not the casino or the game.”

That vision means rethinking the design of safer gambling itself. Pop-up banners and static warnings are too easy to ignore — a phenomenon known as “banner blindness”. Instead, Vincze sees promise in personalisation and micro-interventions.

“There are promising results with offering personalised microbreaks,” he explains. “Someone who has been gambling for more than 60 minutes might be in a state of clouded judgment. A timely and properly communicated offer of an engaging microbreak can result in better decisions, whether to continue gambling or not.”

It’s an example of how technology can be used to protect, not just to profit, though Vincze is quick to add a warning.

“Personalisation is like splitting the atom,” he says. “It can power a city or destroy one.”

In adjacent digital sectors, from online trading platforms to mobile gaming, early behavioural-science pilots suggest that brief, timed breaks can meaningfully lower impulsive choices. Depending on the platform, task, and break design, interventions have produced reductions in impulsive or high-risk behaviours of roughly 10–30 percent in controlled trials. It’s a conversation spreading fast across the industry, as explored in a previous SiGMA News feature where data science is already redefining what “protection” means.

 

Balancing protection with player freedom

The conversation around safer gambling too often tilts toward restriction, and that, Vincze argues, is a mistake.

“You can make the safest structure in the world,” he says, “but you also remove the fun and freedom. Players will just go elsewhere.”

He points out that most players never experience severe harm, yet regulation often focuses exclusively on those who do. “If you apply the same framework to everyone, it won’t work.”

Vincze praises organisations that promote positive play, embedding safety into fun, rather than fear. That balance, he argues, is crucial if self-exclusion in iGaming is to evolve from a tick-box exercise into a trust-based standard.

And while no region has perfected it, cultural factors clearly matter.

“I haven’t heard of one region saying, ‘We’re doing great,” he admits. “But in theory, Nordic and German cultures should respond best — they tend to trust institutions and have pragmatic attitudes to money.”

 

Education is the real game-changer

For Vincze, the biggest leverage point isn’t legislation — it’s learning.

At Casino Guru, his team uses real player complaints to design training for customer support and compliance teams.

“Seventy percent of complaints could be avoided through better communication,” he says.

The approach is simple but strategic: educate the industry first, and the player experience will follow. Education strengthens the foundation of self-exclusion in iGaming, ensuring it’s supported by informed customer service teams and consistent messaging rather than reactive intervention alone.

“It might not be mandatory to monitor players,” he explains, “but if you do it well, they see it as positive and stay loyal. They come back — just not broke.”

 

Designing safer gambling with players, not just for them

When asked what he would change first about global safer gambling, Vincze doesn’t hesitate.

“I’d change who you ask about how it should be implemented. And I’d include the players. I’d create a statistically viable global sample — different ages, genders, regions. Understand what they expect from gambling. No one asks them. That’s what’s missing.”

That kind of global study would be hard to build, he concedes, but the insight would be invaluable.

“I’d follow statistical principles for a representative sample. But it’s challenging to find people of the right profiles and put them through one survey or study. Such samples would be invaluable, but I’m afraid we’re still far from achieving it.”

He adds that behavioural patterns are broadly universal, but messaging must be localised to different cultures and norms.

“Operators talk about localisation all the time,” he says, “but safer gambling should be localised too.”

The same logic applies to self-exclusion in iGaming, which will only achieve true global impact when cultural, linguistic, and behavioural differences are built into its design from the start.

 

Where trust begins

For now, self-exclusion in iGaming remains fragmented — a patchwork of national systems with little shared oversight. But Vincze believes the next evolution of player protection won’t come from rules alone. It will come from trust.

By blending education, cultural insight, and technology, the industry has a chance to move beyond compliance and build something lasting: a gambling culture that treats safety as usual, not exceptional.

“We can’t lock players into silos,” Vincze says. “They’ll always find ways around it. But if we build systems they trust, they might just choose to stay.”

It may be time for regulators and major operators to share the same table, not to invent new tools, but to make the existing ones work together across borders. The industry’s next step isn’t to invent more tools. It’s to earn the right for players to believe in them.

Don’t just read the news — stay ahead of it. Subscribe HERE to SiGMA’s Top 10 News countdown for stories shaping iGaming’s future, weekly insights from the world’s biggest iGaming community, and exclusive subscriber-only offers.

 

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#SaferGambling #SelfExclusion #PlayerProtection #iGaming #ResponsibleGaming #TrustInTech #CasinoGuru #DigitalWellbeing

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