At the inaugural EGR Europe Awards in March 2025, we were delighted to win the European Safer Gambling Initiative Award for our development and use of Hawkeye, an in-house live monitoring player protection suite of tools.
These awards recognise and reward operators, affiliates, and service providers leading the industry in innovation, sustainability, customer experience, and product development across the continent.
This win reflects the dedication of our Player Protection team, as well as the many individuals and teams behind Hawkeye, who continually enhance the platform to keep up with changing regulations and player behaviours.
How does Hawkeye work?
Our Hawkeye system enables live monitoring of all UK digital play 24 hours a day, every day of the year. The system was built fully in-house, enabling us to tailor it to suit our needs and processes. As our approach to monitoring digital play continues to develop, we can increase the sophistication of the system in step with this, adding additional layers and adjusting the parameters as required. Our Markers of Harm model is an overlay in the Hawkeye system. The model scores customers based on demographic, transactional and behavioural data. If a customer’s score exceeds the predetermined threshold, this is a trigger for a safer gambling action and/or interaction.
Our Hawkeye ‘Pilots’ sit within the player protection team, monitoring the system and manually identifying when any customer exceeds the score threshold, while the system also automatically creates a case file in the Customer Relationship Management (‘CRM’) system. This helps to make sure that all customers exhibiting at-risk behaviours are identified, reviewed and contacted where appropriate.
The Markers of Harm score considers a range of behavioural factors including (but not limited to): session time, which is the total time a customer has played a game (rather than simply time logged in); payment methods used; and failed deposits, which can indicate when a customer has insufficient funds to make a deposit. By tracking these behaviours, we not only identify when a customer’s play at a particular point in time is concerning, but we are also able to build a picture of a customer’s behaviour over time and track trends in their play.
We recognise that customers demonstrating behaviours that do not exceed the threshold on Hawkeye for an interaction but fall in the range directly below that threshold could still be at risk. In these cases, we send an early tailored interaction email, which explains the specific behaviour they demonstrated online and offers help and advice on how to manage their gambling.
We are continuing to develop and refine the Hawkeye system in order to most effectively monitor digital play of our UK customers, to identify and recognise concerning behaviours, and ultimately help protect customers and build sustainable relationships with our customers.