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Leaders In Payments
Leaders In Payments
James Neville, CEO of Yaspa | Episode 421
What happens when you combine lightning-fast payments with sophisticated identity verification? James Neville, CEO of Yaspa, reveals how his company is transforming financial transactions by connecting these two critical elements.
Yaspa stands at the cutting edge of real-time payment processing, offering the fastest account-to-account transfers across Europe with expansion plans for the US market. But speed is just one part of their innovation. The company's true differentiator lies in how they package these payments with bank-based identity verification and financial health assessment using proprietary machine learning algorithms creating a comprehensive solution especially valuable for regulated industries.
The gambling sector has become a particular focus, where Yaspa works closely with regulators to establish affordability standards and identify markers of potential gambling addiction. This approach represents a fundamental shift in how payment companies view their responsibilities: not just moving money, but ensuring transactions are appropriate and safe for all parties involved.
With a recent $12 million funding round from Discerning Capital, Yaspa is establishing an Atlanta office, strategically positioning themselves in one of America's payment technology hubs. Neville sees significant opportunity to shape the US regulated gaming market while it's still in its relative infancy, bringing lessons learned from Europe's more mature regulatory environment.
Looking toward the future, Neville offers fascinating insights on everything from stable coins and central bank digital currencies to the potential (and limitations) of agentic AI in payment flows. He challenges conventional wisdom about account-to-account payments at point-of-sale, highlighting how consumer habits and technical constraints create barriers that many industry observers overlook.
Tune in to discover how payments and identity verification are converging to create safer, faster, more intelligent financial ecosystems.
Welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast, where we talk to C-level leaders from across the payments landscape. We'll be discussing the products and services that impact the payment space today, as well as trends and predictions for the future of payments. We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
Greg Myers:Hello everyone and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast. I'm your host, greg Myers, and on today's show we have a very special guest, james Neville, the CEO of YASPA. So, james, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show.
James Neville:You're welcome, thank you.
Greg Myers:So let's start out by having you tell a little bit about yourself, maybe where you're born, where you grew up, where you currently live, a few things like that.
James Neville:Rose, a simple stuff. So, born in the north of England you wouldn't think so by my accident, actually born by the seaside, still live by the seaside, although traveled a lot around in my younger years but always been a fan of the water and the sea, went to university around these parts as well. Over in Essex I did my MBA at what's Now Bains at Cass University in London and just traveled a whole heap around during that period I did. My 20s was entrepreneurship, my 30s was for once a better place in investment banking, and then through to places like Just Eat and also the World Pay where I was a feature for a wee while before the IPO.
James Neville:So quite a big kind of grounding in payments, both from the acquiring side and the other side of defense, so to speak. So I've seen, you know, just seen how the world and the other side of defense, so to speak. So I've just seen how the world and the industry has shaked itself over the last couple of decades. But nice to finally be at the helm of the payments company, given the amount of positive change and interesting things going on but there always is in this industry. But it's a really, really interesting time to be shepherding a ship for our authors.
Greg Myers:Okay, well, let's talk about the company. So tell the audience what Yespa does.
James Neville:Okay. So we're a real-time payment and identification business, so we our common north star as a company, has been about connecting identity and money. So whilst we process account to account, bank to bank, real-time payment however, you want to call it faster than anyone else across Europe and soon to be the state we package a lot with bank-based-bank rules something, however, you want to call it faster than anyone else across Europe and seem to be the state we package that up with bank-based identity. So, james Neville, one Long Street, et cetera, and we also can provide determinant financial health based on a number of machine learning algorithms that we can put in place over the top of your transaction.
James Neville:So we have been working predominantly in the regulated space, with a big heavy bent recently in the gambling arena, and we use the data we get on consumers to give operators as well as warning of if somebody has gambling addiction, gambling behaviors or markers of harm that help them solve responsible gaming in a frictionless manner, but also enable them to open up play for those that have no problems right. So we've been spending a lot of time with the regulators, ukgc and the Dutch equivalent, about what does affordability mean? You know, when is somebody able to place a bet, place a wager? And what are the parameters of that, hopefully kind of shaping the industry into something much, much more safe and secure and ultimately fun.
Greg Myers:Okay, and how big is the company?
James Neville:I should know we were 71 or 72 yesterday, depending on who accepted offers. We keep quite close track of it while we're small, but we try to keep ourselves quite tight-knit over the recent years. But we've had a pretty explosive couple of years just gone past. So we are hiring like crazy. I believe we just stood up about another six people in our leads office this week alone, so starting to really really grow the company placed in Europe, uk and in the US over the three main corners of the ship.
Greg Myers:Okay, yeah, I do want to dive into the US part in a minute, but before that you mentioned gambling. What are sort of the other verticals or industries that you serve?
James Neville:Yeah, so everything that I call the regulated industries, those places where there's an element of KYC, aml obligation and typically there's a higher level of fraud than, let's say, just straight up, e-commerce, where it's a pair of Nikes, so you're putting money on account, taking money off account, crypto, fx trading, high value goods, car dealership those kinds of transactions where you have to have an idea that James is really James behind the transaction.
Greg Myers:And then you closed a round of funding not too long ago and are opening an office in the US, in Atlanta. So maybe tell us a little more about that about that?
James Neville:Yeah, so I spent a bit of time in Atlanta over recent years. I mean it was well-paid home in the US when I worked at WellPayers over Atlanta a lot. I mean, Georgia is lovely, it's hot, but it's also a good epicenter for payments. So if you're going to enter the US on a kind of fintech angle, particularly payments, it's kind of Jacksonville Atlanta, maybe a bit of kind of Miami in there somewhere. But it's the old Dell AT&T hubs that sprung up over the years and that's why the transport network is so cool. So we parked ourselves in Atlanta for now. We raised 12 million US from discerning capital. They've also invested in Midnight in the UK, one of the kind of challenger operators, because they're in Australia and they have a very strong focus on US regulated gaming sectors. So that's a big target for us. We feel we can really shape the industry while it's in its relative infancy in the US.
Greg Myers:So in the US, will you mainly be focused on gambling or will you do some of the similar things you do there?
James Neville:Again similar things. But I think the immediate kind of problem that we can fix is around financial health and it's one of those industries where, as it's in its kind of nascent days like, there's a strong opportunity to put that in place while the industry grows, exchanges and some of the other kind of parties I mentioned. But for the US, I think, as the states by states regulate, they've got a lot of financial health type requirements that people are putting a bit of a hat set to, but not really I'm not saying not taking it seriously, but doing the minimum that they have to, without realizing the journey that Europe's been on to provide greater revenues through responsible gambling. So that's why I think taking our proposition into the US will really help, and there's obviously a lot of stuff going on with 1033 and that going through the court. So what does that really mean right now?
James Neville:But the US is a very different beast to Europe. As I'm sure you know, as an American you're very commercial as opposed to being driven by regulation. So we ended up with PSD2 and also PSD3 through the EBA and the likes, regulating, whereas the US the commercial businesses like Acquia and MX and Plaid and all those kind of aggregated businesses. They did really well by just going to the banks themselves and forming commercial relationships and building outside of a regulated context. So I think 1033 is going to be fascinating for really opening the sector up and normalizing the sector as the regulations in PSP3. But opening in the States is a lot easier, with the infrastructure evolving there on the commercial context, than it has been in Europe I think.
Greg Myers:Well, what would you say? Differentiates your company from your competitors out there.
James Neville:Yeah, I mean again, we're the fastest people to make account-to-account instant payments. We spend a lot of time in data rather than just kind of talking to the bank themselves. We have kind of proprietary algorithms, that kind of predetermine whether slow payments will settle within the two-day kind of window of separate credit transfer. The same is true of ACH being, you know, same day or next day or ultimately kind of 24 hours. We're able to forward funds in advance of settlement with no risk to ourselves or the merchant.
James Neville:The biggest differentiator is, of course, that we provide financial health on transaction, which nobody is doing. If you want to provide a solution in a regulated sector, you've got a whole palette of tools that you have to aggregate anything from IDV to PEP and sanction checks, all of that stuff together, maybe device fingerprinting, maybe TM or transaction monitoring around all this. We wrap that in one singular transaction and it's kind of our goal to be able to arrive to an exchange or an operator or a website and go deposit money and be able to do that and tie KYB KYC process from start to finish.
Greg Myers:How do you go to market? Do you have a direct sales team? Do you work through partnership channels? How do you go to market?
James Neville:I mean all of them, as every payment company does. Direct is where you want something. Your merchant wants something a bit more bespoke. They want to work with you and do something. We're very flexible. At NAC. We provide some very custom solutions for some of the bigger merchants we work with. And then, of course, we go out through the PSPs, through the gateways. We work with the EIs of Europe all of the guys across various different sectors and then we're also white-labeled within other people's platforms. So it's a kind of you know, some people consume other people's PSPs into their white label and then sometimes we're in that PSP. So it's a bit of a mix of everything, but kind of our goal is to focus on the places and the services and software that our customers consume their services from.
Greg Myers:All right. Well, when you step back and take kind of a look at the big picture, where do you see payments headed? Maybe in the next three to five years?
James Neville:I mean, everybody's going to be talking stable coins and the Genius Act. So let's just see where that kind of settles in in the US and we've had this whole kind of wedge-free kind of meta stuff. That didn't quite take off in a lot of respects. But you know Bitcoin's still here to stay, ethereum's still here, stables, you know central bank currencies are still becoming a thing. You know the UK Bank of England's had a program operating for a while. I think you know we'll start to see bank-issued stables. We'll start to see kind of country-issued stables. I don't know, it's kind of a minimum, I'd say kind of one year for most of the kind of bigger economies of the world. And then we'll start to see kind of broader acceptance and kind of insurance and liability shifts and all those kind of things that need to happen for an ecosystem's function.
James Neville:I think beyond there there isn't really a kind of obvious trend in a new payment mechanism or method. But I think then we get into everybody's talking agentic AI and something else. You know, outside of the realms of arriving in a Google and looking for a flight and then buying a flight, it's going to be more about having your own personal wallet. Maybe that includes stables. Maybe that includes your cards and other APMs and you can access to that agent to go off and buying the thing that you want and deliver it the right way. So I mean, personally I don't trust agentic AI right now because the recommendations I get from Google, I mean they're giving me recommendations for orange trainers and I'll never wear orange. Well, actually I might, I'm a McLaren fan, but you see the point right. So you know, I think there's definitely a level of control in all this. But that's, I think, where automation is going to go and it's going to become a little bit more around self-sovereign identity, self-suffering payment methods.
James Neville:What do you want to spend where? What are your limits that you might provide out to the agents and what data do you want to share? And maybe some of that data needs to be deeper for certain sites and shallower for others. Maybe you need multiple identities, pseudo-identities, to go to pay for stuff. Some stuff you may not want to pay with certain kind of direct from your bankers, james Neville. Maybe you want to pay with certain kind of direct from your bankers, james Neville. Maybe you want to pay with that, with a stable coin or something kind of non-identifiable. So I think there's all kind of mixes of stuff coming, but agenti is definitely where we're. I think the world seems to be pushing itself forward to.
Greg Myers:What are your thoughts on, I know, like in the US, the whole account to account you know? I mean it's used when you're paying utilities and things like that, but there's often people talking about using account-to-account at the point of sale, so maybe more like a PIX in Brazil or you know some of those kinds of things. What are your thoughts on kind of that account-to-account payment getting down to where the consumer's actually using it almost at a point of sale, kind of thing?
James Neville:So we struggled with that for a while, which is why we ended up in more of the regulated space. Let's take kind of pause out of the equation for a second. But if you arrive somewhere to buy a new pair of Nike sneakers and you've got Apple Pay and PayPal and everything else that's quite habitualized for people pay by bank, you can put it there. You can put it there, but it's not going to get any traction right. Habits have formed over decades and those decades go all the way back to. You know my dad being shouted visa from a Moroccan souk and he went and bought a carpet and you know all those kinds of things. But you know the predominance of those trust marks and brands just create repetitive behavior. So, trying to get consumer education to a point where someone goes, I would prefer to pay with Chase directly. Why would someone prefer those places where there's maybe more fraud on the transaction? You want to know that that's really the person behind it rather than some anonymous card that could have been path three, alpha bin or Mr Bin for a darknet site. So there's got to be use cases.
James Neville:We tried a bit of POS and we revisited it again about a year back. We did all the work for the casinos in London, so the big ones that have kind of payments in ticket out type machines, and that's gone well. Obviously it's better because you can go to higher limits than cards can, etc. Etc. But the problems that you have at point and fail is really around communication. Rejection Cards you're almost universally going to accept unless there's insufficient funds where there's bits on the account-to-account chain that tend to be more fragile.
James Neville:Some of the banks in Europe have such an implicit fragility to them that if something doesn't work you need to sit there in the state for a while. But you can't keep a customer waiting at a POS terminal for more than about 30 seconds. You need to either see that the money's moved or you need to refund the money, and there's all kinds of unhappy paths that happen with a solution like that. So I'm not sure that POS is necessarily the right solution right now. But in the US you've got a much better way of moving money via push, which is effectively just consent from an open banking transaction can then be used to wire money from one ACH participant to another, whereas in Europe you've got to go through kind of a push transaction on your mobile phone. So I think you know the US is inherently kind of more open, could be more fraudulent, but we'll see how it all pans out. But I genuinely say that POS isn't really a place for account to account.
Greg Myers:Right, okay, well, let's change gears a little bit and talk about you. You talked a little bit about your background, kind of brought us up to the CTO of WorldPay, but maybe what led you to starting the company, what was the impetus of that?
James Neville:I mean a number of things. So I've been in and out of the payments industry. As I said, on kind of both sides of the acquiring fence. I looked at what fraud really meant. Bitcoin was a merchant at the time that I was at WorldPay. All these things revolved around passphrases and pins and 3D Secure and everything kind of came together at one time, everything from GDPR, psd2, sca it was actually a.
James Neville:It was a number of things, but a board meeting that we had at WorldPay where we were discussing all of these things coming together and what would happen if somebody had to type their name, address, date of birth, mother's maiden name, all kinds of other things at the point of payment. Well, conversion was going to fall off the cliff. So the discussion then was there must be someone who tokenizes identity, like we tokenize a pound, like we tokenize a card. That wasn't. So we were like, okay, maybe we should go off and do a business. That did that, and that's actually where it started. So we were originally called Citizen. Like. Our first proposition was essentially taking all the data you'd require at kind of point of sale, remote or online the GDPR and PSD2, rolling that all together in an identity token that somebody could kind of pass around and reuse with our hands, retype all the stuff. We ended up working with the banks quite heavily for about a year and a half, two years, and then the banks got a little bit scared by GDPR, and GDPR came along and came to force and didn't want to talk about identity anymore, which was just. That was the time that open banking became a thing in Europe.
James Neville:You know 2017, we started getting the kind of account information component in the UK and then, two years later, the payment side. So we decided well, you know, if we're going to be in the payment seeking system, we should just be a payments business. Because if we're going to be in the payment seeking system, we should just be a payments business. Because if we're handling the account to account identification piece, why not do both? Why rely on another participant? And that's kind of where I went. Aside from that, you know, I've had some great leaders work around me and I've had some terrible leaders work around me as well, and I genuinely thought I could build a company that had a great culture, that could be really successful and also where people could be really successful and enjoy their time working here. I think we built a really strong culture of trust and actually a lot of fun as well. If you speak to people that work here, we've got a very flat hierarchy and we all work really, really collaboratively.
Greg Myers:Okay, okay. Well, what are some things you're passionate about? So, maybe one work-related passion and one personal passion.
James Neville:I mean work. I'm a techie At the end of the day. I grew up with my dad's Unix terminals when I was like eight years old and I was playing adventure to start with, but I learned Shell when I was a kid, so I've always been a techie. Anything that involves tech, you can see. It was music around me as well. It's also very, very techie, so you know very similar type things.
James Neville:I like generative music. I like writing code that writes music, so to speak. So I've got a whole heap of stuff around here that does kind of algorithmic, kind of textural audio. So that's a bit of a passion of mine. Used to run sound systems when I was in my 20s, so you know we used to run around and play loud music to people and that's always been a passion of mine. You can tell I'm a quite loud individual generally. And then my hounds. So I've got you won't see them, but I've got four Weimaraners under the table just here behaving like I was implicitly waiting for their afternoon run. But they're my personal trainers and how I keep fit.
Greg Myers:Okay, okay, you know I want to go back on something we kind of touched on it, but I think maybe, given kind of the business you're in not so much the payment side but the identity side how is AI sort of, I guess, two parts. You've probably been using machine learning and AI for a while. Right, it's not a new concept to what you're doing, but maybe how do you see it? Improving what you do, moving forward or changing things?
James Neville:Yeah. So I think at the moment we're focused on things like categorization and identifying things that are outliers and going much more kind of broad, full-brush terms. We've been looking at fixing kind of last mile, not chargebacks in our world it's more kind of request for information, kind of RFIs, and connecting lots of individual parties that way, so kind of automating that kind of conversational process. We're not going to put it in front of customers yet. I know Klarna tried to do that and backtracked on it very quickly. I think as a business we try to keep a very personal touch to things. I just don't think AI has really got that personal touch just yet. But as we move deeper into transaction monitoring and that side of the business 100%, absolutely more to unlock transactions that existing tools say are suspicious, being able to really deep dive on those and release them a lot faster.
Greg Myers:Okay, okay. So you've obviously been around payments for a while. So if someone came to you maybe they're right out of university or school and they say hey, james, I'm looking to get into the payments industry and build a career there what would you tell them they should do to be successful?
James Neville:Probably ask them why. I mean, I actually fell into it myself Me too. Yeah right, but it's one of those industries that, because it touches so many things, there's always kind of a pathway back to the payments. They'll try to run away for a few years but you always end up back in the same thing. But it's just one of those kind of foundational industries. If you think of money generally, it's just it's always going to be around. So I wouldn't necessarily maybe I'd ask why, but you know where, like what.
James Neville:Why do you want to be in payments? Is it because you love money, you're interested in, you know, making it move faster? You're interested in the fraud aspect of it, like what? Why do you want to be in payments? Is it because you love money, you're interested in, you know, making it move faster? You're interested in the fraud aspect of it, like what? What really floats your boat? For me it was. It was always technical. Again, you know, I was a techie, I I spent a long time on I was at sporting, bet building, you know orchestration platforms that you'd hit a certain level of of kind of ingress of funds You'd have to shift to another provider. So, like, the technical challenges were there. So I think, if you're a techie, join a things app or join a startup, but just and just learn.
James Neville:This industry is absolutely rife with acronyms. You know it's acronym soup, right, we've just said GDPR, sga and that one. We were all fine with it, but anyone else that isn't in payment would go what the hell are you talking about? That stuff comes second nature and it takes a wee while. So anyone that wants it, it's not scary. There isn't all this stuff that's unintelligible. You just need to immerse yourself in it for a while. So I would find somewhere where there's an open floor, it's a FinTech, there's a product guy around and just listen and learn that way, one take at a time.
Greg Myers:Before we close out, just kind of open the floor, see if there's anything else that maybe we didn't talk about that you wanted to mention. So kind of open floor for you for closing comments.
James Neville:Thanks for delving into the background. I think not so much that I haven't mentioned, but I definitely think there's another category opening up around data and payments generally and combining things like device fingerprinting, combining bank identity or card identity. Maybe even MasterCard's been moving more into digital services and financial health just to create more of a space where the transaction can be trusted. And I think as everybody starts to think in those terms, as chargebacks become more rife and fraud becomes more rife, I mean we all start thinking in a similar kind of term connect identity and money will be in a much better space.
Greg Myers:Well, James, I think that's a great way to finish up the show. So thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate your time. I know it's very valuable.
James Neville:You're more than welcome. Thanks so much for having me.
Greg Myers:Great, and to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast. Make sure you visit our website at leadersinpaymentscom, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes. If you enjoyed listening, please share on your social channels as well.