PlaySignal wants to reach at-risk players before self-exclusion, and not after

Over 300 people self-exclude from UK gambling platforms every single day. Alec Gehlot has spent the last four years watching that number climb—first from inside the industry, working with major operators and CRM platforms including Optimove, and now from the outside, building a startup called PlaySignal to address it.

His argument isn't that self-exclusion is broken, but that it arrives too late. By the time a player opts out, often for five years at a stretch, the outcome is permanent—for the player and for the operator. "When someone self-excludes," Gehlot said on the podcast, "that is not something that is recoverable."

PlaySignal is a front-end responsible gaming tool built to intervene before that moment. The product runs on a traffic light system—green, amber, red—each corresponding to a different level of player risk. At green, it surfaces behavioral data for the player: session length, deposit totals, win/loss position.