Meet the Yorkshireman whose ambitious firm helping gambling giants is making own bet on Leeds

Leeds has become something of a hub for major gambling companies in recent years; now an ambitious payments and identity fintech company is joining them in making its own calculated bet on the city.

Yaspa, which specialises in using open banking technology and AI to help regulated gambling companies ensure they are complying with customer verification rules, has recently opened an office at Platform in Leeds. Its Yorkshire team is focused on the firm’s ongoing efforts to develop its American business, with an initial 10 people hired.

CEO James Neville, who is originally from Redcar and whose career before co-founding Yaspa in 2017 included roles as chief technology officer for Worldpay and head of feature development for Just Eat, says having a Leeds base for the business alongside its existing presence in London is a natural fit.

“It is principally focused on developing our market entry software for the US as we’ve just expanded to the US,” he explains.

“The Leeds team focuses broadly on everything America at the moment and the London team focuses on everything UK and Europe. The two will come together at some point. We’ve met some very talented people in Leeds with incredible pedigree.

“Even as we extend our international expansion, I want to keep engineering to Leeds and London.

“The UK is the world’s leader in payments, we’ve always been at the cutting edge of cards and banking. The US is markedly behind on a lot of fronts; we are trying to change that.”

He says by next year, the company could employ up to 40 people in Leeds.

The Leeds office move follows Yaspa securing $12m in investment, led by US gambling investment firm Discerning Capital whose partner David Williams has joined the Yaspa board.

Mr Williams said in July he believes Yaspa’s technology is particularly strong in addressing two of the biggest issues with online gambling payments; player protections and ‘chargebacks’ where customers dispute transactions; sometimes in a fraudulent attempt to recover money after a losing bet.

He said: “We are excited to be partnering with Yaspa to help them expand deeper into regulated gambling.

“The high-risk nature of gambling payments makes it an area in need of innovation and we believe Yaspa addresses two of the biggest issues: chargebacks and player protections.

“We believe that any operator who evaluates Yaspa’s account-to-account product versus their existing payments provider will end up adding Yaspa.”

There is clearly a huge opportunity for the company; the British gambling market alone brings in £15.6bn a year, with £6.9bn of that coming online. Meanwhile, America’s open banking market is forecast to increase to more than $35bn by 2031 at an average growth rate of 22 per cent a year.

James says Yaspa seeks to balance out the “seesaw of fraud and friction” that comes with buying products online.

“The easier you make it for someone to pay, the more the fraud levels go up and vica versa. If you make it harder, fraud levels go down but naturally conversion goes down when you make it difficult for people to pay.

“All of this is about the intersection of identity; who you are, where you are and the actual instrument of payment."

Identifying customers is particularly important in the field of gambling, with anti-money laundering rules and monitoring in place to minimise the risk of harmful betting.

James explains: “We’ve got deeper and deeper into combining identity and money as the business has matured. Originally it was your personal information and we have moved further into actual analysis and AI on the transactional information; your historical purchases and costs of what you bought and where you bought it.

“We started the business saying ‘let’s serve everything from e-commerce to gaming’ and actually where this makes a whole heap of sense is where businesses have to identify the individual.

“So where does the money come from and what is the financial standing of that individual? That usually means, ‘give me a bank statement, give me a utility bill, a driving licence or a passport’. It is our goal to do that all in one transaction. Industries like i-games, which Leeds has a very big imprint in, needs to do ‘know your customer’ but also source of funds and the financial health of an individual.

“If someone has £1,000 in their bank account and wants to place a bet for £500 is that really a responsible thing for him to do? If someone has started betting £200 a day and more, has that behaviour changed over time and become harmful rather than recreational? We can do all of that with AI at the point of transaction. We feel we have gone into this sector which Leeds has a big footprint over, the more we able to serve customers in that market.”

He says he believes Yaspa’s technology can eventually be used well beyond the gambling industry.

“Success is when people want to work with you, want to buy the product and also people want to join your company.

“We want to be recognised as the fastest way to deliver instant, verifable money worldwide. That’s going to mean we are the market leaders in a lot of the regulated sectors we operate in. On a personal level, I want to build an enduring brand. Everybody that works here wants to say, ‘I work for something as big as a PayPal or a Stripe or a Visa’. They want to be able say I was among the first 30 people to start building this business.

“That’s the really beautiful thing about start-ups; going from me in an office with a laptop and pretty much nothing else all the way to being an enduring brand that will be around long after I disappear.”