By The ANJ will focus on reducing excessive gambling and protecting minors.
France.- The national gambling regulator L’Autorité Nationale des Jeux (ANJ) has called on licensed operators to work with it towards the objectives of its new strategic plan for 2024-26. Its focus for the next two years will be reducing excessive gambling and protecting minors.
This plan involves three pillars: to “drastically reduce the proportion and number of excessive gamblers in the gambling market”, to ensure transparency and integrity and to enhance “the economic dimension of regulation to gain a better understanding of market balances and provide solutions to the changes it is facing today”.
The regulator said that despite “significant progress”, “problem gambling still plays too large a role in the gambling market”.
ANJ president Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin said: “After three years in office, we now believe that the regulation of gambling must take a turn that involves the market gradually moving towards a less intensive model.”
She said of the objective of reducing excessive gambling: “This voluntary target to reduce the number of excessive gamblers and to strengthen the protection of minors will be monitored over three years. It can only be achieved if all the players join forces alongside the regulator to move the goalposts: gambling operators, public authorities, institutions, associations.”
The ANJ took over as gambling regulator in France in 2020. In three years, it has seen a sustained increase in revenue generated in the market, reaching a record €12.9bn in full-year 2022, a rise of 20 per cent year-on-year. In the past two years, it has put a major focus on reducing gambling advertising intensity.
Online casino remains excluded from France’s regulated gambling market, something that both online gambling operators and land-based casinos want to change. It has been estimated that the unlicensed gambling market is worth €1.5bn. However, the government has so far resisted the proposal of regulated igaming.
