The University of Nevada, Las Vegas International Gaming Institute (IGI) released new research that identifies various clusters of payments behavior from data provided by Sightline Payments.  

IGI’s Payments Research Collaborative studied data from gambling payments companies to understand how payments behavior can support responsible gambling efforts.

Sightline contributed data to IGI from nearly 100 million transactions across the full spectrum of gaming operators—online casino, mobile sports betting, pari-mutuel, lottery, and cashless gaming at casinos. From that data set, IGI researchers explored whether transactional data could be used to differentiate between thousands of customers.

The study found that more than 88% of customers exhibited patterns of behavior that were not suggestive of any unsustainable or harmful behavior. Within the remaining 12%, researchers found three clusters of behavior that exhibited payment behaviors that may represent customers who are at potential risk of experiencing harm.

The researchers first described each customer’s payment behavior according to the frequency, amount, intensity, and variability of their deposits and withdrawals, as well as the time of day they made deposits and how often deposits were declined. They then used a machine-learning algorithm to cluster similar customers together based on these payment behaviors.