Closing the Gap

The distance between protecting infants and toddlers in Puerto Rico from dengue fever to promoting responsible gaming through unified self-exclusion is not as wide as might appear at first glance.

Both efforts are founded on the principles of public health, the science and practice of protecting and improving the lives of populations by focusing on promoting healthy lifestyles; detecting, responding to and preventing infectious diseases; and addressing the wider social determinants of health like the environment, education, social conditions, inequity and access to health care.

But there’s another, less apparent connection between the two public health practices: Jonathan Aiwazian. Aiwazian, the CEO of idPair, is also a published research scientist who studied dengue fever in Puerto Rico.

How do you get from studying the impact of tropical diseases to founding a company designed to help gamblers practice responsible gaming, allowing them to self-exclude from both casinos and online apps with the click of a button? It comes down to the simple idea of helping people.

Learning to Help

Aiwazian, 37, who earned an engineering degree from Cornell University in 2009, went to work for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after graduation. That experience led to him coauthoring several research papers on not only dengue fever, but also on a birth control implants.

Getting from peer-reviewed research papers to CEO wasn’t a straight path, though. Aiwazian, who grew up in the small town of Moorpark, California, was always interested in gaming, and left the CDC to launch Cafrino, a developer and publisher of online social games, in 2010.

“I actually started in sweepstakes poker,” Aiwazian says. “It was before it was controversial. It was just free to play, and advertisements funded some of the prizes.”

Even while pursuing that interest in gaming, Aiwazian’s public health background was evident. After a few years as a product manager, then trader and finally director of U.S. operations at BetConstruct, the pull of public health brought him to the Kindred Group, first as vice president of sportsbook and then VP of U.S. product.

Kindred Group was founded with the idea of providing a better and safer way to make digital bets while also actively working to prevent problem gambling. Once again, the concept of protecting and improving the life of a population—in this case, online players—from harm is part of Aiwazian’s path.

“I have never seen someone who’s more interested in doing right by people, but from a for-profit company, which I think is just unusual,” says Marlene Warner, CEO of the Massachusetts Council on Gaming and Health, the statewide advocate and service provider for people who make the choice to gamble across Massachusetts.

The council helps from prevention through long-term recovery. “It’s not the experience I typically had in the last 24 years. (I’d say that Aiwazian) has utilized his operator experience to really inform his work, which I also greatly appreciate. I think he’s well-rounded, even-keeled and out to do the right thing.”

Warner met Aiwazian through Spectrum Gaming Group, which introduced them for a data project a few years ago. Warner says while working on one of these consulting projects, they realized the technology for regional and national self-exclusion was possible through what Aiwazian was working on in combination with state-level efforts.

When they meet with state officials across the country, as they recently did in New Mexico, Warner says they complement each other. While she is boisterous and talkative, Aiwazian is calm and data-driven. “He’s a preparer,” she says. “I think people appreciate him and are eager for him to share more. I think they leave the conversations trusting him and wanting more.”

Sports is Unifying Theme

“I’m just a big sports fan myself,” Aiwazian says. “I love sports. Before I started this company, I was betting on sports quite often for entertainment. If there was some random game on, I would put a few bucks on it and watch the game. So, I am just a big fan of sports betting, fantasy sports, a little bit of casino play as well. And then when I got the job at Kindred I saw that there was a big gap in what we could do for our customers to help them keep it fun and recreational.”

Growing up in Ventura County during the heyday of the Los Angeles Lakers’ Kobe Bryant-Shaquille O’Neal championship era, he naturally became a fan of… the Indiana Pacers. Call him an “anti-Lakers fan.” “They were just, you know, importing players and going for championships, whereas the Pacers would draft (players) and then they would get stolen by other teams. It’s hard to like a small-market sports team, unfortunately.”

That love for a small-market team—he’s also a Pittsburgh Steelers fan—paired well with his time at Kindred. Fans of small-market teams are always worried about protecting their team and players from the high-dollar spenders of pro sports, so Kindred’s focus on safe play and protection from problem gambling fit.

“They’re one of the stronger operators in the gambling space when it comes to player protection,” Aiwazian explains. “They quantify the harmful turnover they get, and try to reduce that, and they have a lot of initiatives.

“But what I noticed is that even if there was a player that you would help, or they might self-exclude from your platform or set a deposit limit, what ended up happening was they would reach the limit and then just go play somewhere else.

“I know this from talking to people and understanding that data—people have an average of three to four accounts for wagering and for all sorts of gaming. So, you can’t really expect to help a player as a single operator. It has to be a group effort. That’s where there was a gap in what technology was doing at the time. So I said, ‘Let’s create this technology.’ Because everyone just said, ‘Oh, the technology can’t do that.’ So let’s create the technology and then you can’t give me an excuse after that.”

This gap in protection guardrails meant that people who play in multiple spaces and multiple apps had all sorts of off-ramps from self-protection. There was nothing to stop a problem gambler from closing one app on their phone and opening another to continue chasing losses.

Creating Guardrails

“I think people are struggling with responsible gaming at times,” Warner says. “We try to provide them information to make an informed decision about their gambling, about how to use the tools that are offered to them or to make the decision to self-exclude.

“What I appreciate about this is that there’s a bunch of people out there right now who are offering artificial intelligence solutions to identify when someone’s play is starting to get out of control, or trying to be a little more preemptive about it, but we want to stop it. And that’s terrific. I think that’s awesome, but to do it operator by operator is problematic.”

What Aiwazian and idPair offer is a way to harness the data that the operators and states have, but is siloed, and make it accessible so that it is shared in a beneficial way for both the player and the operator around safety issues.

“I think he’s constantly thinking about, how else can I be of use?” Warner says. This desire to be of use leads Aiwazian to seek ways to build capacity, make improvements and streamline once-clunky efforts at self-exclusion nationwide.

Aiwazian bucks the image of the “tech bro.” Well over six feet tall, he is a strong believer in giving back. “There are a lot of universities now that want to study the data for gaming research,” says Josh Faber, senior advisor to Spectrum Gaming Group and senior advisor to the National Council of Legislators from Gaming States.

While they have the desire, many of these academic institutions lack the gambling-specific researchers. Faber says he got Aiwazian involved with Morgan State University, a historically black college in Maryland, to participate in a seminar to help study sports betting and gaming data and analytics.

“There are not that many people in the responsible gaming space that were also on the operational side of gambling companies,” Faber says. “I think (Aiwazian), besides being a very smart person, knows how gambling operations work on mobile and online, so he has more insight than others.”

“I think he’s doing it from a perspective of someone who was on the operational side, so he’s not just a Ph.D. person that studies a company, but someone who actually kind of knows and has that perspective,” Faber adds. If he sees in the data someone playing at 2 a.m., he doesn’t see that as an anomaly, something that someone who was not on the operator side might miss. He sees it as someone who understands that is a specific action meant to gamble.

Pilot Testing

That’s where idPair fits in. IdPair is planning to launch a pilot testing of new software in March 2025 that links self-exclusion efforts across all gaming platforms in New Mexico and Nebraska as part of a partnership with the Coalition for Fantasy Sports. The goal is for this software to be nationwide by the end of the year.

The Coalition for Fantasy Sports is a fantasy sports industry group made up of Betr, Dabble, PrizePicks and Underdog. IdPair is the first recipient of Underdog’s Responsible Gambling Innovation Fund. Underdog awarded idPair a $1 million investment in March.

The software would allow players to self-exclude across the board with a single click on any of the four coalition sites. This simple process can make the practice of self help much easier.

Making things easier to promote a healthier person and community is part of the underlying mission in public health as well. Public health researchers gather data about targeted communities to find ways to help them live a better life. The same principle applies to what Aiwazian and idPair are trying to do.

Players who desire to set up guardrails for themselves through self-exclusion usually experience a bad day playing or lose more than they have lost before, Aiwazian says.

“The issue that we’ve come across is that it’s often very hard to self-exclude,” he says. “In some states, you have to walk into a casino to self-exclude, which gives you one last opportunity to change your mind. So what we’re trying to do with the national program is to make it very easy to self-exclude. We verify your identity and make sure you’re not signing someone else up, but then it’s all done from your device. You don’t have to go to a casino or find a notary or do all sorts of stuff like that.”

Anecdotally, Aiwazian says he has seen that once New Jersey moved its process online, the number of people taking advantage increased. “We’re trying to do the same thing—make the process easier, keep all the identity verification going so it protects the program and protects people’s data, but making sure that they get the protection they’re seeking.”

But it does come back down to the desire to help people. All of the technology in the world is wonderful, but if people aren’t able to use it and improve their status, then it isn’t effective.

“I think it just keeps everything in perspective,” Aiwazian says. “Technology companies get into the nuts and bolts of everything, and they’re just trying to make the technology function. But everything we do is based on, ‘How does it help the person on the other side? How does it help the community? How does it have those downstream benefits as well?’

“It’s not just something where we build the software and try to sell it. We’re trying to improve the communities and improve the environment around gaming.”