In the run up to the UK’s Remote Gaming Duty rise to 40% last week, initial conversations were largely commercial – budgets, margins, promotional spend. That much is predictable and understandable.
As the higher duty comes in to force and trading reports reflect the new reality, the subsequent conversation should be different - and it's the one I find more revealing. Boards shouldn’t simply be asking how margin will be protected. They should be asking how bonus decisions are made, whether they stand up to scrutiny, and who owns them. As I argued in my last blog, under 40% Remote Gaming Duty, imprecision is no longer inefficient - it's now also very expensive. This blog is about what the shift from imprecision to accountability actually requires and why it counts so much.
Discipline is no longer optional. It needs to be demonstrable.
Bonus spend has always carried financial weight. Under Remote Gaming Duty at 40%, that weight has increased materially. As Chris Conroy set out in his analysis of the mechanics, the effective tax rate under the current system isn't 40% - it's 50%. The distortion between revenue and promotional efficiency means imprecision is now visible at board level in a way it wasn't before.
Our data suggests that up to 87% of operators’ bonus spend goes to players outside the efficient range.
The operators thinking about this clearly aren't asking "how do we spend less?" They're asking "how do we know whether what we're spending is right?" Legacy campaign infrastructure was never built to answer that question. Siloed systems in casino and sports accentuate the problem. In the new paradigm enabled by real time AI, when allocation is informed by live behavioural signals - player state, engagement trajectory, session patterns - every intervention has a rationale and every outcome can be measured.
Bonus spend stops being an absorbed cost and becomes a managed investment, with the accountability boards are now actively looking for.
Personalisation is no longer just a player pursuit - it's key to margin efficiency too.
Modern operators process millions of behavioural signals every hour. The moments that determine whether a bonus should be deployed - or withheld, and when - happen at the individual level, in real time. Scheduled campaigns and static segmentation were never built to operate at that speed or that scale.
The honest reality is that most campaign infrastructure in this industry reflects decisions made in a different era - one where imprecision was an accepted inefficiency rather than a commercial liability. As we explored in our AI Masterclass on bonus efficiency, operators are already moving away from blanket awards towards real-time, behaviour-led allocation models. The direction of travel is clear.
Real-time AI is the structural solution. It interprets behavioural signals continuously and converts them into contextual, in-the-moment decisions - with clear rationale and measurable outcomes. That is what Future Anthem's real-time AI platform was built to do: delivering personalised experiences at scale in the moments that matter, with the commercial discipline that boards now demand. Personalisation is no longer just a player pursuit – it's key to margin efficiency too.
Precision is not a marketing optimisation. It is commercial infrastructure.
I want to make this point directly, because it tends to get missed in commercial conversations about promotional efficiency.
The same real-time behavioural intelligence that improves allocation also improves restraint. When you can read every player's behaviour in the moment, you can identify when an incentive is the wrong call - where engagement has shifted, where a session has moved in a direction that makes intervention inappropriate. The right decision, in those moments, is to hold back.
That matters commercially. For operators who take their responsible play obligations seriously, it matters beyond that too. Real-time AI doesn't just find more moments to spend - it gives operators the clarity to act in the moments that are right, for every player, and to recognise the ones that aren't. That's what sustainable growth looks like in practice.
Some operators will respond to 40% Remote Gaming Duty by absorbing the pressure and reducing spend. That's a defensible position in the short term.
The ones I expect to build genuine advantage are those who use this moment to redesign how bonus decisions are made - embedding real-time behavioural intelligence at the core of commercial operations, not as a pilot, but as standard practice.
Remote Gaming Duty didn't create the inefficiencies it is now exposing. It just made them expensive enough to matter. The distinction between operators who survive this shift and those who thrive through it won't come down to budget size. It will come down to the quality of their decision-making - the clarity, confidence, and capability to act in the moment, at scale, for every player.
Surviving is defensive. Winning is deliberate.
40% Remote Gaming Duty hasn't created new problems. It's made existing ones impossible to ignore. The operators who respond by improving decision quality and not just by cutting spend are the ones who build a real advantage.
At Future Anthem, this is exactly the problem our real-time AI platform was designed for – listening to behaviour at the individual player level, in the moment and converting those signals into decisions that are both commercially sound and clearly accountable, for every player, at scale.
The operators who come through this well won't be the ones who cut hardest. Book a demo to see how real-time AI supports better bonus decisions under Remote Gaming Duty.