Responsible Gambling, Open Banking and the Future of Money. Oh My!

Welcome to Money Isn’t Everything. I’m Mary Wisniewski, Cornerstone Advisors editor-at-large and host of the show that explores early-stage ideas that could, if not already, shake up financial services.

On today’s show, I’m interviewing James Neville, the CEO of Yaspa.

He’s also the former CTO of Worldpay.

We get into how Yaspa is connecting identity to money, including applying that combination in the high-risk area of gambling.

He is also very blunt about AI and gets into why the startup is expanding in the U.S.

You won’t want to miss it.

Here’s our conversation.

James, welcome to Money Isn’t Everything.

It’s so wonderful to have you on the show today.

Thank you for inviting me.

Well, I was excited when I saw that announcement that you’re coming to Atlanta.

But we’ll get into that in a minute because I want to set up the conversation around Yaspa and how you’re in all these hot areas of identity, real-time payments, open banking, and then also cautioning operators and gamblers on whether they’re in danger while gambling.

I find that fascinating as a broad overview.

But I wanted you to start us off with, what is your focus today at Yaspa?

Okay.

So, true to our original story, we’re a business where our North Star is connecting identity and money.

We are an instant payments business.

When we say instant, we mean seconds, not minutes.

As fast as we can possibly move money into an operator or a merchant, and then the money back out to yourselves as a consumer.

We are quite unique in that we combine identity and financial health at the point of transaction.

So you noted just before that we operate in markets where you need to know the person who’s putting money on account.

So you need to know that it’s James from One Long Street, but equally it’s very relevant in highly regulated contexts.

Gaming, you mentioned, there are anti-money laundering obligations.

Where does James’ money come from?

How much money does James have?

Actually, in the context of financial health, has he got enough money to put this money on site?

In a gambling context, is he able to put money on account and gamble $10, $20, $50?

Has his behavior changed over time?

If his behavior has changed adversely, then the operator should be able to intervene and say, “Just pause, James. You’ve spent too much money here.”

Effectively, we empower the operators and the players, the consumers, to be able to make those decisions in real time.

See, okay, this is so interesting to me.

I’m just imagining the practical elements of this.

How much data do you need to be making these recommendations?

On the basic side of things, you need effectively a month trailing.

Obviously, going back gives you a bigger pattern.

But in the U.S., you’ve got unauthorized returns.

You’ve got all kinds of flavors of different returns that happen within the banking ecosystem.

You can see chargebacks.

You can see those from cards and from ACH.

You can see changes in somebody’s income.

Obviously, the longer you go back, the more you can see stability of income.

But there’s obviously a very different scenario if somebody’s got a salaried payment now, they’re employed, versus somebody who’s got agency or contract payments.

You want to see, going back, is there stability of that kind of income stream?

All of this is, I think, you can think about it as a real-time view of a credit score.

Credit scores, Experian, they’re building intelligence from missed payments and scheduled payments and credit cards and mortgages and loans, all those things.

They can only see adversity or any problems with somebody’s credit history once those markers of missed payments or late payments start to happen.

They don’t really come on someone’s record for a good month or two ahead of when the missed payment actually happened.

So open banking, and the way we’ve been doing it across Europe and soon to be the U.S., is really about taking somebody’s financial data in real time and applying practical methodologies across that to say, what’s their financial health?

Very much like a credit score, but in near real time.

And for the person who might have an addiction or is overspending, what makes them want to opt in?

There are a number of reasons.

People opt in in a gambling context, and certainly anywhere where you have trading of any variety, you generally have limits.

So even if it’s crypto, you’re allowed to deposit this much money because we don’t know your financial history.

We don’t know your financial health.

So the upside to a consumer is that I can get my limits raised.

I can deposit more money at the start because I’m qualified to put more money on account.

But also, they get away from the random interventions that stop them in their tracks.

So typically in Europe, when somebody goes to a certain level, a certain threshold of spending, whether it’s an AML piece or whether it’s a concern about responsible gambling or putting too much money on a crypto account, the intervention is, “Please provide me your bank account.”

At that point you’re like, okay, now I need to go get a bank statement and scan it, upload it.

Someone needs to look at it, make some determination over it.

That takes a long time.

That’s not hours.

That’s days.

So the upside for the consumer is, here’s my transactional information.

I don’t need to be asked for it.

You can just make that determination.

So there’s no friction in intervention, whether it’s in play, trading or games.

I think this is fascinating.

It seems to be more of a topic in Europe.

I think I’ve seen some neobanks that are like, “Oh, I can stop you from even making a payment at gambling.”

In the U.S., it seems a little bit more free-for-all at times.

But I know card controls are very much pervasive in the United States.

I guess I’m thinking about the broader thing of this friction or intervention.

If we broaden it up a little bit, do you think more of this is going to happen in different ways?

Yes.

Europe’s definitely pushing that direction.

Classically, you’ve got the 7995 kind of hard code that blocks people.

Certain merchants will block 7995 transactions or deposits on account.

The banking sector, the EBA, is starting to mandate registration of merchants across payments, both recipients and payers.

So there will be a way of building up a sectoral view.

Whether that leads to blocking a lot remains to be seen.

The U.S. is obviously much more liberal around that side of things.

Europe’s got, particularly in the higher-risk sectors, it’s had an industry that’s well established for 20, 30 years.

America’s regulation, you recognize that online gambling has only become regulated over the last decade, really, in the U.S.

So Europe’s gone further and it’s started to talk about affordability regimes.

Has somebody got enough money to put that bet on the football or not in real time?

Then they’ve gone again a little further in places like the Netherlands, where they mandate limits.

So you can only gamble €300 or €700 within a prescribed period.

Of course, that seems fine on the face of it.

It seems like a lot of money.

But somebody gambling €700 that’s earning a €2,000 paycheck, it’s quite a lot of money.

But somebody that’s earning a lot of money with disposable income coming out their ears, that seems like a really small number.

So there’s objectivity around what is somebody’s discretionary spending capability and what’s their freedom around that.

The U.S. has taken it slightly differently.

The responsible gambling laws are weaker, but there is a view around financial health and what operators need to do to enable that.

A lot of this is, it’s not box ticking, but it certainly doesn’t have the stringent nature that a lot of the regulators in Europe apply.

But naturally, it will transition over time.

Yeah.

I’m also fascinated because one of the problems that seems to be in the U.S., and I’m sure elsewhere, is just the fintech apps.

I know Robinhood gets criticized a lot for making it feel like a gaming experience to invest.

So this is an interesting other example of how to intervene.

I mean, everything’s gamified at the end of the day, right?

Everybody’s trying to drive people to apps.

You’ve got the rise of DFS, daily fantasy sports in the U.S.

Prediction markets are currently predominantly offshore, but Polymarket and the like are trying to come onshore.

There’s the whole heated debate, certainly in California, around sweepstakes and what is a PrizePicks versus a consumer-to-consumer type sweepstakes.

So there are all kinds of different layers of this that are slowly being unpicked by the regulators.

But again, the U.S. sees this slightly differently to Europe.

There’s always been a, I guess, kind of gray morality that surrounds the sector in Europe.

Whereas in the U.S., if something is legal, then it’s generally embraced and it’s an interesting sector to play in.

So we definitely see a different type of appetite in the States than we do in Europe.

You recently are setting up shop in Atlanta.

Why now?

Why U.S. now?

Well, firstly, we raised money to do it.

You’ve got to stay true to your word.

Yeah.

Well, there is that.

There’s also getting the team.

But we had so much stuff to do in Europe and building our current business.

It makes more sense to go into another market when you’ve already established a product.

I’d say the customers are semi-transposable to the U.S.

But we see the opportunity, the rise of gaming and gambling in lots of different contexts.

You also alluded to gamification generally across those markets.

That’s a huge growth sector in the States.

We’ve got a huge amount of confidence in working with the operators across Europe.

So it’s natural that we go over there.

Personally, my wife’s an American.

She’s a San Franciscan.

So we are over there a while as well.

It would have been San Francisco, but we ended up in Atlanta because, I don’t know if you know, but the old kind of banking corridors were really Atlanta and Jacksonville.

They were the two big cities that Worldpay and FIS concentrated themselves around.

Most of the Brits that want to come to America go, “Oh, it’s New York or it’s San Francisco. It’s really sexy. It’s great corporate.”

But actually, the people that are really going to do the work for you if you’re building a business are generally in those locations.

So that’s how we’ve ended up there.

Atlanta’s a pretty city.

I liked it all the times that we’ve gone there.

So that’s become our natural home.

I think the biggest company we share within the SaaS space outside of payments is probably Mailchimp.

But yeah, being built around there.

The BeltLine is really, really nice.

So we will see how our time develops over there, but it’s proximate to most places in the U.S.

Oh, that’s good because I know some people have, it’s such a pain just to make a simple business flight based on where they live.

But you are arriving at a wild time in the U.S.

I mean, the Trump administration and the CFPB.

If you’re just listening and not watching, there was an eyebrow raised.

But also, open banking, one might say, has been a bit under attack.

Or another one might just say the business model is being sorted out.

Most recently, Plaid and Chase made an announcement where Plaid will be paying Chase for data access.

What that price is remains unknown.

So I guess there’s a lot to unpack there.

Maybe to start with, how does it make you feel arriving in a time like this?

I mean, look, I’ve got the age on me.

Those of you who can’t see me, I’m half-century gifted.

So I’ve seen a lot of swings in administration over the years.

Let’s not make this political because you can go one side or the other.

But in lots and lots of ways, the world’s changing massively and the world dynamic of power has shifted massively over the last 20 years or so.

So I think the Trump mantra, or maybe the Republican mantra, of trying to dilute the state, so to speak, try not to fund too many international organizations, and having a looseness around things like that, we’ve seen that before.

The open banking rule, it’s good for standards.

It’s really good for standards if you’ve got that in place.

But everyone’s going to fight for the commerciality of the data that they’re given.

I think when we look at the history of Europe, this all really started from a European mandate and also complemented by the U.K. trying to push for account switching being completely seamless.

So we had two dimensions.

We had one that was regulatory, very European-driven, and one that was competition and markets and consumer-driven in the U.K.

The U.K. ended up establishing a body.

The open banking standards were formed from that, and it had a trustee with a mandate from government to make this stuff work.

And it did, albeit it landed just before coronavirus and stalled for a bit and carried on.

But Europe tried to enforce it by the regulatory dimension.

Of course, what you get there is the pushback from people on the sharp end of it, the banks going, “We don’t really want to do this. We don’t see any upside from it. It’s costing us money in infrastructure, hardware, consultants, etcetera.”

Over the years, we had some extreme pushback from banks when we questioned that they weren’t compliant with the regulations.

They were like, effectively, “We neither have the resources nor the inclination to comply.”

Oh, I guess that’s a no.

So the U.S. has taken it slightly differently in that, even without open banking standards, there’s a commerciality that’s cultural.

You like making money.

It’s a capitalist heartland, should we say?

So the banks and the Plaids and the MXs, they’ve already made these relationships with banks.

In fact, if anything, they’ve made them pre-compliant in the same way some of the European businesses like Token made money making the banks compliant.

Now you’ve got Jamie Dimon asking for more money for access.

That’s a commercial push.

It’s very Trumpian, an art-of-the-deal kind of thing.

So yeah, I think you’ll see a little bit more of that, but they’re already being paid by most of these providers anyway.

So this is more of a, and it’s my personal opinion as well, I don’t know what Jamie is actually saying, so let’s not be religious about this, but if people want to get more money out of a commercial agreement, then it’s the art of the deal, right?

So that’s what everybody is pushing for.

I think the standards, trying to push that direction, will make things easier for the aggregators.

So the Plaids, the MXs, the acquirers, the FISes of this world.

But we directly work with them.

We’re actually not doing bank integrations directly ourselves.

That’s not our business.

Our business is in the value of connecting payment to the money itself.

So yeah, it might lead to a bit of consolidation in that aggregator market.

It might lead to a bit of price competition.

That all remains to be seen.

But it is just divvying up the price pot, I think, at the moment.

I like the way you put it there.

I’m wondering, in that Plaid announcement, it did say it wouldn’t be changing pricing terms for the relationships that it already has under contract for its fintech, bank customers, etcetera.

But I’m wondering, I know a fear I’ve heard from people in the industry is, “Oh, then all the fintech companies that didn’t account for this kind of fee could shift their business model in this way or that way.”

Other people are saying, “Well, if they can’t handle that fee, are they supposed to be existing?”

I mean, look, that’s just supply, demand and price elasticity, right?

Eventually, it will all settle down.

From our experiences across Europe and across the U.S., the pricing models are pretty wildly different on both sides of the continent, and equally there are a lot of differences in the U.S. as well.

So it’ll harmonize.

It may consolidate.

I don’t think it’s going to freeze out the fintech sector.

If you’re someone like us and, let’s just say, our providers decide to increase cost by 50%, then that’s going to have to come back on our merchants over time.

But that’s just the nature of the market.

It happens in Europe as well.

I also want to quiz you a little bit about life at a startup versus a larger organization like Worldpay.

What is that like for you?

Do you have a preference of which way you play?

I mean, look, I’m 32 years in industry, and the first 10 of mine were in startups.

They were a lot more startup-y than the startups I’m in now, should we say.

It was two lads in a warehouse sitting on a cabinet rather than a chair.

So I’ve been all the way down there building businesses in my 20s.

Now capital is pretty abundant.

I wouldn’t say that we’ve raised as much as some of the other fintechs out there, but it’s easy enough to find money if you want to scale.

There are benefits to both.

I like the randomness of every day, and I like the challenges.

I like things going wrong and being able to fix them.

Every day, honestly, every day is a challenge here.

But again, if you’re in a large corporate, that gets masked.

There are just more people dealing with micro challenges every day, and the politics increase and so forth.

But the wages are good and the stability is there, and you’re not staring into the abyss every day and thinking you’re going to fall off a cliff backwards because a chasm opens up.

But I think I worked out over the years that I’m definitely not a corporate guy.

As much as I was CTO of Worldpay, that time there was, make us more like this, do this, do that, change the organization.

You’ve got unfettered access to be able to do various things.

So a lot of my career has been entrepreneur and intrapreneur at the same time.

Yeah.

That’s really cool.

I definitely know that corporate life masking the problems, or someone presenting on a slide this terrible stat, but reframing it as why it’s still good, which is a little pen over the stats that everyone looks at before that one.

Yeah.

A little bit of theater.

A little bit of corporate theater.

There’s one segment of this show, and it’s going to move us into a different subject, and it’s “That’s What You Said.”

This is what you said on a different podcast.

I believe it was a podcast, not an article.

It’s tied to AI.

I think you were talking about Klarna at the same time, when it had pushback from rolling out a chatbot and then firing a bunch of people and hiring them back.

You said, “I don’t think that AI has really got that personal touch quite yet.”

I’m wondering, okay, let’s unpack that a little bit more.

What is missing from AI for that personal touch?

It’s a model.

There’s no humanity there.

There’s no abstract creative thought.

It’s a very clever premise that can string language and various other aspects together in a series of tokens.

It’s predictability and things that have happened before.

It’s a way of regurgitating the same, as far as I’m concerned.

If you look at a lot of the AI art, everyone’s regurgitating something that’s based on some theme.

I don’t see a lot of originality there.

You’re not going to see the next Mona Lisa being put in front of you from an AI bot.

Equally, I think I had talked a bit on agentic AI before.

I’d probably trust an agentic AI to go off and buy me a new hammer because it definitely knows what hammers are good.

But is it going to go off and buy my next pair of sneakers?

No, not really.

Because I think I said before, I like orange.

So occasionally, I’ll wildly buy orange.

That doesn’t mean I want to wear orange every day.

You look at it from a tokenistic perspective, maybe AI goes off and buys me orange all the time.

I’m not quite sure if that’s right.

But I use ChatGPT all the time.

It’s good to pull together research.

It’s good to do the drudgery.

I, at the moment, would not get it to answer my customers because I just think it’s a really bleak, horrible way of looking at the world.

I think Klarna saw that from its limited rollout.

It’s good for us in chasing things like RFIs and finding data from one source and putting it together with another and firing an email back or firing a response, things like that we use all the time in ops.

But I’m not putting it in front of customers right now.

I truly believe in people and customer service.

Sorry.

There was a term that’s been trending this week called “workslop,” saying this GenAI problem is causing this workslop.

They mean it in memos, decks, writing code, to your point of unoriginal, also causing another employee a lot more time to have to deal with it.

Yeah.

I haven’t seen a lot of it in our organization yet.

I had one of my sons over to do a marketing internship.

He’s only 14, so he came and did a marketing kind of run-through.

He really enjoyed it.

But there was one slide in there, you could just tell it was AI workshop, if you want to call it that.

It’s so obvious.

I mean, it is so obvious when somebody does that because you can look at people’s language, you can look at how people structure stuff.

You know when they’ve copied stuff straight out of ChatGPT.

One hundred percent.

Yes.

It has this odd upbeat tone.

But do you think that pendulum is going to switch?

Yeah.

I mean, look, again, it’s got its usage.

But you’re starting to see marketing being dominated by AI content.

Historically, SaaS businesses and financial businesses are all built on connectivity and backlinking.

Build your content web and get likes and so forth, and you legitimize yourself for SEO.

That’s happening at broad scale now.

But what’s going to happen with ranking some of this stuff?

Google and its friends, or whatever search engine it happens to be, Perplexity or whatever, is going to know if that’s AI-generated.

So does that push your rating down or does that push your rating up because it’s backlinked?

Oh, that’s a good question.

I don’t know the answer to it, but I’m sure they’re all thinking about it.

Yeah.

I’m sure they are all thinking about that.

Well, James, there’s one more road I want us to go down because it’s another hot topic.

Stablecoins.

There’s a lot of hype on it, and you’re seeing these stablecoin things popping up in the U.S. almost every week.

I’m wondering, what’s your position on game-changing for financial services?

What are the consequences for banks?

How are you thinking about it?

Yeah.

So, I mean, look, we’re not a bank, so banks probably think about it in very different terms to us.

But the fiat rails, the real money rails, they’ve been dominated by SWIFT, Faster Payments.

You’ve got ACH in the U.S.

They all take an element of time.

The settlement itself is an agreement of messages between two parties.

I think whether it’s Ripple, whether it’s Circle, whether it’s any other party that’s creating USD stablecoins or euro stablecoins, whatever it happens to be, you’ve got to ask yourself, why would you send money over those rails?

If it’s a $20 payment, you’re not enabled for sending USDCs, and I kind of get it.

But if you’re doing large cross-country, cross-border movements, why would you do SWIFT over holding a wallet in two places, and then you’ve only got to worry about fiat on and off?

One use case, I spoke to one of my friends in the Philippines who’s building a business, and obviously there’s a lot of concern about local currency fluctuation, as there always is in an emerging economy.

So people always want to hold U.S. dollars, but the local banks won’t give you a U.S. dollar account.

They want you to hold local currency.

So the obvious answer is, pay me in USDC.

I hold USDC.

Then the natural extrapolation of that is anybody that’s non-Filipino or Filipino that doesn’t live there anymore sends their money back in USDC locally, and then somebody can do whatever they wish with it from there.

There’s all kinds of OTC provision.

So I think cross-border is probably currently the first prime of attack, and in emerging economies.

It’s probably helping to stabilize the U.S. dollar hegemony that’s been in place for many, many decades.

USDC is the most dominant stablecoin.

We’ve got Circle’s euro equivalent.

I see less uptake of that in Europe than I do USDC.

Oh, interesting.

There are lots of regulations around all of this.

We’ve got VASP in the U.K. or MiCA across Europe.

They’re quite hard licenses to get and hold.

Once the U.S. really establishes its regulatory framework around it, I think you’ll see everybody just kind of moving in that direction.

I think USDC as a common method of settlement and payment will become pretty pervasive in the next five years.

Well, I was going to ask you what you’re expecting in the future and you just lined it up.

I just have one last question for you.

But before that, if someone wanted to reach out to you, what’s the best way?

Or any last thoughts on financial health and transactions and opportunities there?

I’m always happy to talk to people in industry about what their take is, particularly around how consumers view this kind of stuff.

Whether it’s intrusive, whether it’s positive.

We always try to spin it as a positive.

I’m out there.

You can find me on LinkedIn.

Send me a message.

Always happy to chat.

We’ll be in Atlanta soon.

I’ll be pretty much based there for the majority of next year.

So come knock on our office on Peachtree Street and say hello.

Any other questions, just follow up.

All right.

Well, lovely.

My last question for you, James, is what is the image on your phone’s lock screen?

It changes every 10 seconds, and it’s set up as portraits of my children and my dogs at the moment.

So one day I’ll get a dog, and another day I’ll get my daughter, and another day I’ll get my oldest son.

So the heavy hitters.

That’s lovely.

Yeah, indeed.

James, thanks so much for being on Money Isn’t Everything.

It’s been a joy to ask you about a bunch of different things in banking.

So thank you so much.

Brilliant.

Thank you, Mary.

It’s been lovely to have you here.

Okay.

So one thing I learned is the upside of challenges.

In his words, “I like things going wrong and being able to fix them.”

If you enjoyed today’s Money Isn’t Everything episode, make sure to hit that follow button on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you’re listening.

I’ve got more great conversations coming your way, including up next, where we’ll be exploring debt collection and the attempt to make it more enticing.

Yes, you heard that right.

Catch you then.