Swedish gambling inspectorate Spelinspektionen has affirmed its warnings to the government that meeting the 2 July deadline to implement deposit limits will present difficulty.
It comes following the proposals last month of Health Minister Ardalan Shekarabi for a weekly deposit limit of SEK5,000 as well as a SEK100 limit on welcome bonuses – a directive that has been widely criticised by both industry leadership and wider stakeholders.
These new rules were initially due to come into force on 1 June, prior to a government amendment pushing back the enforcement to 2 July, with the rules made applicable to online casino products.
Spelinspektionen emphasised that applying the new regulations specifically to casino games, rather than making them applicable across all gambling verticals, would pose more of a challenge and make the implementation more ‘time-consuming’.
“The Gaming Inspectorate has no detailed knowledge of the extent of the changes involved, but it cannot be ruled out that these are changes that are both time-consuming and that can, to some extent, require recertification of the systems,” it said.
“Therefore, there is a risk that there are licensees who cannot meet the new requirements within the proposed time.
“Different limits for different games can in themselves pose a difficulty for the gaming companies in cases where the operator has a license to provide both commercial online betting and gaming.”
Yesterday, nine Swedish CEOs signed a joint statement which called for the government to reconsider the ‘unrealistic proposals’ to tighten restrictions on the online gaming sector, which are said to ‘play into the hands of the unlicensed market’.
Suggesting an alternative to the deposit limits proposed by the Ministry of Finance, the consortium of CEOs have outlined a number of countermeasures to help promote safer gambling environments and standards. The countermeasures include:
- Expanding licensing requirements to technology provisions,
- The promotion of self-exclusion register Spelpaus
- The integration of an IQ campaign
- Enhanced collection and sharing of player data, risk ratings
- Further extending Spelinspektionen’s oversight of marketplace requirements.
