Ben Haden
IAGR President

As President of the International Association of Gaming Regulators (IAGR), Ben Haden has overseen a growth in membership and annual conference attendance, attracting the largest annual gathering of regulators worldwide. He’s led a focus on key international regulatory challenges, such as illegal gambling.

 

His day job is at the UK Gambling Commission, with responsibility for delivering a robust, transparent evidence base through a mix of market, social research and data science.

 

Talking to him about IAGR, he notes ‘the power of genuine collaboration is something that I believe in passionately – I’m always struck by the range of skills and experience around the international table.’

 

Ben arrived at the Gambling Commission through the merger with the National Lottery Commission. He had worked in senior roles within the NLC across Insight, Corporate Affairs and Operations, including Head of Evaluation during the third National Lottery licence competition. He also sits on the board of a 14 school multi-academy trust in the UK.

International Association of Gaming Regulators (IAGR)

There is a question I am asked often, in various forms, by regulators new to the international stage: how do you make cooperation happen? Not in the abstract sense, because the principle of cooperation is easy to endorse, but in practice. Across jurisdictions with different legal traditions, different political pressures, different cultures and different starting points. How do you build something that works?

It’s a question worth sitting with. Because the honest answer is that for most of the history of gambling regulation, we did not. Regulators operated in their own lanes, shaped by the boundaries of their mandates. The global gambling market was growing, but the regulatory response to it was largely national, largely fragmented and (in much of the world) largely absent. Significant proportions of gambling activity took place in grey or unregulated markets, beyond the reach of any framework designed to protect consumers or maintain integrity.

That picture has changed substantially. Significantly more of the world is now regulated than was the case a decade ago, and this trend continues. Jurisdictions that once sat outside any framework have developed licensing regimes, established regulatory bodies and begun engaging with the international community. That shift matters not just for consumers in those markets, but for the coherence of global regulation as a whole. In a global market a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and the proliferation of regulated markets has strengthened the chain.

What is less often observed is that this expansion has brought with it a degree of convergence that many would not expect. Newer regulatory frameworks have largely been built on practice that has worked elsewhere. They have absorbed lessons from more mature markets and in doing so have helped establish a set of shared principles that now span an increasingly broad range of jurisdictions.

But it is not uniformity, and it never will be. The gambling industry is not uniform. The societies it operates within are not uniform. Expecting identical regulatory frameworks across jurisdictions of such different character would be neither realistic nor desirable.

Progress has always come from trying something new. But convergence of principle is not the same as uniformity of approach, and that distinction matters. Harmonisation can help with efficiency in certain areas and we are interested in how we help with that but IAGR’s role has never been to impose a single model. It has been to create the conditions in which regulators can learn from one another — to share what works, interrogate what does not and build the relationships that make genuine cooperation possible when it’s needed.

And there are moments when it is genuinely needed. The clearest example is illegal gambling. This is not a challenge any jurisdiction can address alone. Illegal operators do not respect borders. They exploit the gaps between regulatory frameworks, leverage the complexity of international supply chains and operate at a scale that can appear to put them beyond the reach of any national response.

IAGR’s Illegal Gambling Working Group is a direct response to this reality. It brings together regulators from across the world to share intelligence, align approaches and build the kind of operational trust that makes collective action possible. It is perhaps the clearest demonstration of what IAGR membership makes possible — not just the exchange of ideas at an annual conference, but sustained, practical collaboration on a challenge that goes well beyond the borders of any single jurisdiction or sector.

There is a temptation to place illegal gambling in the ‘too difficult’ category — to acknowledge the scale of the problem while quietly concluding that effective action is beyond reach. The working group is evidence that it is not. What is required is not the harmonisation of local frameworks. It is collaboration with impact: locally, regionally and internationally. That is a task regulators can undertake, and IAGR exists to help them do it.

The growth of IAGR’s membership and the sustained attendance at our annual conference (in a calendar that has never been more crowded) reflects something real. Our conferences bring together not just regulators, but the broader community that makes effective regulation possible: government officials and policymakers, industry executives and compliance leaders, legal and regulatory advisors, technology and payments specialists working in regulated markets, and researchers focused on responsible gambling and regulatory theory.

Regulators are seeking connection not as a courtesy but as a practical necessity, and increasingly so is everyone around them.

Jurisdictions discover that the landscape continues to shift beneath them. IAGR has been watching closely the development of prediction markets for example as that has become an increasingly global question for regulators and jurisdictions to consider. The absence of certainty is not a failure of regulation. It is the defining condition of this industry. What matters is whether our frameworks are adaptive, and whether our relationships are strong enough to support collective responses to shared challenges.

IAGR’s annual conference in Lima this October represents both a milestone and an opportunity. It marks our return to South America after eleven years, and to a region whose regulatory community has made significant strides in that period. It’s also an opportunity to deepen the connections that make cooperation real rather than rhetorical, and to demonstrate that the international regulatory community can move from information sharing to collective action.

The question of how you make cooperation have impact has no single answer. But it has a clear prerequisite. You have to show up, build the relationships and do the work. That is what IAGR has been doing since our first gathering in Monte Carlo in 1996. And it is what we will continue to do.