There’s a familiar regulatory standoff playing out across Europe: government on one side, the gambling industry on the other, neither budging. But in Prague, something different is quietly happening. Rather than locking horns, operators, regulators, addiction specialists and government are actually working together as partners.

A fresh approach to an old problem

The Institute for Gambling Regulation (IPRH) is technically an industry association, representing roughly 95% of the Czech Republic’s regulated market. But Jan Řehola, its director, wants you to understand what that actually means. This isn’t a traditional lobbying body. IPRH functions as a permanent platform where stakeholders jointly develop evidence-based policy solutions. It’s basically an attempt to break out of the adversarial dynamics that have trapped gambling governance for decades.

The motivation is partly financial. Illegal gambling currently drains the Czech market of an estimated 15.9 million dollars in lost tax revenue every year, with unlicensed operators pocketing roughly CZK 14.5 billion in player losses annually. One look at those numbers explains why collaboration might serve everyone’s interests.

The IRIS system: data without databases

The institute’s flagship project is called IRIS, and it really does embody this collaborative thinking. The problem it tackles is surprisingly straightforward: modern online gamblers don’t stick to one operator. They juggle multiple accounts, hop between platforms, chase competing promotions. Each operator only sees its own slice of that behaviour.

Take a player’s activity. On one operator’s books? Looks fine. View the same account across four platforms simultaneously? Different story entirely. Escalating stakes, longer sessions, mounting losses. Clear warning signs. Yet one operator might step in with a protective intervention while another is simultaneously offering that same customer a bonus.

IRIS avoids the obvious fix: a centralised database full of personal gambling histories. Critics understandably worry those would become surveillance machines. Instead, the system uses pseudonymised identifiers generated by the Czech state licensing infrastructure. Operators never exchange customer names or account details. The platform analyses behavioural signals across participating firms, applies a common risk methodology and returns just the resulting risk classification to each operator simultaneously.

Real incentives, real questions

The architecture is clever. Whether it actually delivers on its promise? That’s the open question.

To his credit, Řehola doesn’t pretend otherwise. “I would not present IRIS as a magic solution that works in 100% of cases,” he says. “Nothing in prevention or addiction risk reduction works like that.” That kind of honesty matters.

And there’s an elephant in the room here. Gambling companies remain commercial enterprises with shareholders expecting returns. High-intensity players often generate disproportionate revenue. So why should sceptics believe that suddenly, commercial incentives have magically aligned with player protection?

Řehola doesn’t sidestep it. He reframes the commercial logic instead. If individual operators compete in isolation, responsible gambling becomes a competitive disadvantage. A firm tightening bonuses or issuing protective warnings risks losing players to competitors with lower standards. The revenue shifts elsewhere, not vanishes.

IRIS changes that equation. If most of the market’s major operators adopt a common methodology at the same time, responsible behaviour stops being a competitive liability and becomes a shared market standard. Revenue doesn’t disappear; it gets redistributed across the industry.

Testing at the market level

The system’s real power lies in functioning as a living laboratory. Rather than relying on predictions, IRIS continuously evaluates aggregate risk scores across all participating operators. Success won’t be measured by how many interventions happen, but by real behavioural change: declining risk classifications over time, fewer escalation patterns, better use of limit-setting tools, fewer players slipping into high-risk categories.

Plus, it allows rapid iteration. If a particular message or intervention fails, the model adapts. Interventions can be evaluated almost in real time, letting the platform shift based on live market data instead of waiting for academic studies that take years.

How this collaborative model performs in the Czech Republic carries weight far beyond Prague. It signals a broader European shift: the growing recognition that neither governments nor operators alone have the information needed to handle increasingly messy challenges like illegal gambling, online harms and cross-border player behaviour. Collaborative governance, frankly, might deliver what neither group could manage alone.

What the team thinks

Carl Mitchell says:

Ashworth’s piece on the Czech model is refreshing because it highlights what we’ve been saying in the UK for years, that operators and regulators actually want the same thing – a sustainable market where players are protected and businesses can thrive. What’s striking here is that the Czechs seem to have cracked the code on something we’re still fumbling with, which is getting addiction specialists into the room early rather than as an afterthought, and that collaborative approach could yield better outcomes than the adversarial framework we’re stuck with across most of Europe. The real test will be whether this partnership can maintain its integrity when profits dip or when political winds shift, but if it holds, other jurisdictions would be smart to study what Prague is building.