SASFA

South African Safer Gambling & Fair-play Association

Safer gambling.
Fairer technology.
South African innovation.

SASFA is an independent coalition bringing together technology and software professionals, industry participants, players, researchers, NGOs and policy specialists to develop practical approaches to safer gambling and fair play in a market that is now almost entirely digital.

Our mission SASFA Standards

Gambling is changing.
Regulation needs to change with it.

Games, payments, identity, algorithms, advertising and player behaviour are now a single interconnected system. A licence number in a website footer says very little about any of it.

South Africa needs a conversation about what safer gambling should mean when the product is software. That conversation has to involve the people who build the technology, the people who play, the people who study the harm and the people who write the rules. SASFA exists to hold it.

Three pillars

Safer

Education, player awareness and practical intervention.

Not a campaign to stop people gambling. A push to give players better information and better tools at the moment decisions are actually being made.

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Fairer

Transparent mathematics, independent verification, provable fairness.

If a game claims to be fair, a player should be able to understand why. Mathematics can be published, random-number generation can be tested, outcomes can be verified.

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South African

Local software, local innovation, local economic participation.

South Africa has developers, designers, mathematicians and financial technology. There is no reason it should only be a market for gambling software built elsewhere.

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The principle

Open Gambling

Safe should mean more than the existence of a licence somewhere on a website. It should mean that the technology, mathematics, identity systems, game mechanics, payment processes and player-protection mechanisms can be independently examined and understood.

In development

The SASFA Standards

A standards framework rather than a set of opinions. Each standard sets out what a claim has to be backed by and what compliance would look like in practice.

  1. 001 Player Transparency What a player must be able to establish about a platform before and during play: who operates it, under which licence, what the rules are and where the terms live.
  2. 002 Game Fairness What a fairness claim has to be backed by. Published mathematics, independently tested random-number generation, and where a game claims to be provably fair, a mechanism a player can actually run.
  3. 003 Responsible Gambling Technology Player-protection tools judged by whether they work at the moment a decision is being made, rather than by whether they exist somewhere in an account menu.
  4. 004 Identity & Age Verification Establishing that a player is who they say they are and old enough to play, without collecting more personal information than the purpose requires.
  5. 005 Advertising Transparency Marketing that states its real terms up front, is not aimed at people who have excluded themselves, and does not present gambling as a solution to anything.
  6. 006 Software Integrity Knowing what software is actually running: who supplied it, which version is live, and what changed when it changed.
  7. 007 Player Complaints & Dispute Resolution A route to a decision when something goes wrong, with timeframes a player can hold an operator to and an escalation path that does not dead-end.

These standards are in development and open for comment. SASFA does not currently certify any operator, game or software provider against them.

Why should South Africa only be a market?

South Africa has developers, designers, mathematicians, financial technology and world-class technology companies. Very little of the software behind its gambling market is built here.

SASFA supports the development and adoption of competitive South African gambling technology, so that more of the intellectual property, technical expertise, employment and economic value generated by this market stays in the country. That is not an argument for shutting international companies out. It is an argument for creating conditions in which local companies can compete.

  1. South African developer
  2. South African software
  3. South African operator
  4. South African player
  5. South African economic value

Gambling should never require blind trust.

Understand the game, understand the odds, check the operator, check the software, understand your own behaviour, and know where to find help.

For players