Single Customer View

The gap a single customer view addresses is straightforward and long-standing. Operators can only see their own accounts, so a customer losing modestly at each of ten sites looks unremarkable to all ten while being in serious difficulty overall. Every affordability regime built on per-operator data has this blind spot, and the industry’s critics have pointed at it for years.

Building the answer has proved harder than describing it. A shared view requires operators to pool commercially sensitive customer data with competitors, needs a lawful basis under data protection law for processing financial and health-adjacent information, and demands governance that neither the industry nor a regulator can obviously provide alone. Trials have run in Britain and the concept appears in policy documents across Europe, but no major market has a fully operating scheme. The alternatives in use are weaker: national self-exclusion registers, which catch only those who ask, and bank-level gambling blocks, which catch only card spend. For anyone reading affordability policy, the single customer view is the test of seriousness, because a regime that stops at operator-level data has accepted the blind spot it describes.