Ep. 4: What Is Pay by Bank? James Neville of Yaspa Explains

Here is the transcript as provided.

Welcome to The Payments Shed Podcast, the weekly podcast that dives into the big topics, trends and people shaping the worlds of payments, fintech and business leadership, with your two co-hosts, myself, Grant Evans, and Justin Hanna.

Welcome to the next episode of The Payments Shed Podcast. Today we have James Neville, the CEO and Founder of Yaspa. These guys are driving the next chapter of open banking.

James, please give us an introduction and a little bit more about you guys.

Thank you. Good to be here. Thanks for the invite.

I’m James. I’m the CEO of Yaspa. We’re an intelligent payments business that combines identity and money in a single transaction.

Our goals are to reduce fraud and friction in regulated spaces, meaning those spaces that typically have high fraud rates, where you need to have KYC acceptance and need a way to connect the person’s identity to the actual transaction.

We leverage open banking AIS and PIS and combine that in a single flow. We’ve been operating across Europe and are about to open in the US, so there’s lots of good stuff to talk about.

Fantastic. Before we talk more about Yaspa, what was your experience before Yaspa? Why Yaspa?

It depends how far you want to wind back, but I’ve got 20 years in tech.

I started my own business as an entrepreneur before Google and Amazon were a thing. I’ve been coding since I was eight years old. That is a long time ago.

Most recently, before I started this, I was at Sportingbet for a few years. I was at Just Eat for a while. I was at Worldpay for a while, before all of this acronym soup of GDPR, SCA and 3DS2 came together with PSD2 around the time of early open banking.

A lot of the payments space was very concerned about conversion and what introducing stronger identity control would mean.

Fraud and friction to us have always been like a seesaw. You relax your fraud controls and it makes things much more difficult. We’ve always been about making things simpler to transact, while reducing fraud at the same time.

In Worldpay land, and I know you’re ex-Worldpay as well, the concern was conversion. Secondly, how do we make the repeatability of name, address and date of birth on presentation of a card transaction simpler?

We started the business to tokenise identity. Initially, the business was called Citizen, which makes it clear why you called it that.

We worked for a while with the banks, then GDPR came along and the banks got really scared about sharing identity.

We pivoted. We got our PSD2 licence as an authorised payment institution with the FCA, and we’ve been building ever since.

Through that, we recognised after a while that Europe had some of its challenges in payments, particularly around chargebacks and return rates, as you call them in the US. We’ve been constantly building into the A2A space.

The same is true of the US. It has some challenges too, but I guess we’ll come to that.

What would you say were the earliest challenges you had launching an open banking business?

When we started, we wanted to integrate every single bank.

When you look at how the space has evolved, you’ve got the banks, combined with the various aspects of Europe, building the rails. Then you’ve got the aggregators over the top.

We realised after a while that we shouldn’t really be an aggregator. We can integrate the banks as we see fit, but the game for us was not in infrastructure. It was more in the payment flow itself.

Getting reach across Europe has probably been the toughest job.

I think I mentioned it to you earlier. In late 2019, when we got our licence, one of the banks said, “We neither have the inclination nor the resources to comply with regulations.”

A lot of the journey for open banking, from infrastructure onwards, has been about some of the pushback from banks and the broader ecosystem.

As much as we say “open”, the banks don’t think they want to be part of an openness.

That was probably the earliest challenge, getting some kind of critical mass and getting over that whole hump of banks not wanting to play ball.

We’re in the UK, and banks have been much better in the UK than they have been across Europe.

Beyond that, the other challenges are really the things we were supposed to do in 2019 and 2020 when COVID first kicked off. We haven’t done half of them.

The roadmap was there. We were supposed to have trusted beneficiaries and VRP. I know you go on about VRP a lot. It’s been the bane of lots of people’s lives.

We’re four or five years in and we still haven’t done a commercial VRP outside of sweeping.

There’s a lot of work to do. The regulator has a really strong job to play in trying to make some of these things happen because they are of benefit to consumers, not necessarily just to the bank.

I feel like 2025, and going into 2026, is quite a poignant time for open banking.

It’s been a very busy market, with lots of start-ups and scale-ups within the open banking ecosystem.

We’ve seen some larger players like Kevin disappear from the market. More recently, Tink acquired Envestnet Yodlee, and then obviously Visa pulled out of that market.

What really differentiates Yaspa, and what has given you that longevity and stability?

I know you talked about hiring recently as well. You’re scaling while others are maybe slightly in decline in the sector.

We lost Vyne as well to Tarabut, although not lost, Vyne sold.

I think it’s really sectoral for us.

We started this journey saying it would be fantastic if you could identify and pay in a single transaction.

Why are you having to go through a registration form, KYC and then ultimately pay?

You’ve got models like BankID in Sweden that allow you to do the same thing on a transaction. Ultimately, PayPal allows you to do a whole element of that.

Pay by bank, whatever you want to call it, is what we recognise as the strongest term.

We did a survey last year that determined that pay by bank works where you’ve got a kind of captive volume in account-to-account transfer.

We talked earlier about DCMS in the car space, making a deposit to a car dealership. It’s high value. It doesn’t have to be done in ten seconds. It can be done in 30 seconds or 30 minutes, and there’s recourse after the payment.

That suffers some of the things around settlement timings and so forth.

For ecommerce, buying a new pair of Nikes, you arrive at a list of payment options. You’ve got Klarna, Apple Pay and others.

Even if pay by bank was on there, I’d be inclined to use Apple Pay or PayPal, something that’s familiar and almost habitual in nature.

People are creatures of habit.

But it’s quicker, right? Apple Pay is quicker than open banking.

There you go.

If you then look at a sector like trading, FX or gaming, anywhere where there’s a KYC element and people are familiar with making larger transfers, crypto is a strong example.

People are not using Apple Pay to buy Bitcoin. There’s an open goal there in the manual nature of that operation.

Account to account fills that.

You mentioned Kevin. We thought for a while about point-of-sale situations, and we’ve integrated with retail machines, but that’s been the hardest job, even in the UK.

If something doesn’t happen in person within ten or 15 seconds, what’s the recourse? You’re not going to make another payment.

You almost need to predetermine when the payment hasn’t settled and refund instantly so the customer can try again or do something else.

The lack of focus on unhappy paths has been some of the challenge in user experience with pay by bank.

You talked about the automotive example. I talk about automotive quite prevalently as that high average transaction value sector.

You said the guy at the dealer winced when you pulled your card out to pay your deposit.

Then you’ve got a difficult situation where that individual within the dealer has been told by the management team, “Try and get people away from card where we can. We’ve got pay by bank now.”

You’re not going to need educating on that, but someone who doesn’t know pay by bank has to have it explained by the staff member. They have to explain what it is and how it works.

They might not be able to do it on their app, or they might not be familiar with it.

You create a friction point when you could have just put your card into the card machine and paid that amount.

Yes, there would have been a higher charge, but could they bake that card cost into the top-line price for the vehicle?

People will charge you, but you’re not supposed to be surcharging for card payments in any way whatsoever.

I do think there is an education piece that has to happen.

That was all part of the OBIE. There were plans to do lots of consumer education, but it never really happened.

You look at other markets like the Netherlands. They had iDEAL for years. You used to walk through Amsterdam and go to a shop and there’d be no cards. It would be iDEAL or cash.

They’re very familiar with those schemes.

There’s familiarity there. In Germany, there’s Giropay.

If you want it to work, you make people aware of exactly what’s happening.

But then you need to make the experience work.

Exactly.

In the UK, you can scan a QR code. There’s familiarity. You’ve got to remember, going back to coronavirus, QR wasn’t really a thing.

Now it’s ubiquitous and everyone knows it because they bought their Eat Out to Help Out-type stuff on a table, and that familiarised our whole population with QR codes.

We’ve also got app-to-app redirection in the UK, whereas Europe doesn’t really have that.

Your European experience is scan a QR code, open up a bank screen and type your IBAN. Most of them are familiar with it. They’ve got their IBAN saved somewhere. It’s prefilled for them, but the experience is subpar.

You’ve got to fix these parts of user experience.

We obsess about conversion and clever things around how we represent IBANs, skipping screens, and we do that on a bank-by-bank basis and country-by-country basis.

The US then presents all the challenges around open banking requiring a login and password.

Are people going to store that? Is it going to be in their password manager or BitLocker, whatever that happens to be? Do they feel safe about sharing a username and password?

You remember the early days of Trustly. You would log in with a username and password. Trustly would go off and effectively screen scrape your payment.

People got familiar with it early. I’m not sure people are comfortable with that now.

Where people want to gamble or play, they’re probably going to go through the payment method they’re told to use, so there’s a sector element to that as well.

The US is largely driven by that. There’s very little OAuth. There’s no app redirection.

It’s username and password, consent presented, and then we make a payment by a push ACH, but that’s a consented push.

The chargeback rates, or return rates, are likely to go up as a consequence.

We talk about some of the open banking platforms that have gone down, and maybe some of the open banking platforms that have been quite successful are the ones selling to higher-risk sectors and being able to get good margins on open banking as an APM.

They don’t want to offer card payments because the acquirers say no because of the chargeback rates, and so on.

There is definitely a niche in some sectors for open banking.

A conversation I’ve had with many of the issuers is, “Why would we offer it when we’re making interchange basis points and scheme fees?”

That’s always going to mean it has to be an alternative and sit alongside card payments, as opposed to replacing them.

We said initially that there’s always a commercial opportunity for banks, such as revenue sharing.

There was premium data. I can’t remember what it was called now. Premium data was mooted as a way for banks to commercialise onboarding use cases.

Fifty pence between you, the TPP and the bank makes a whole heap of sense.

You’ve then got a direct identify-and-pay solution. We did some POCs on that with a couple of banks, but you’ve got to get every single bank on board.

The UK and Europe versus the US way of doing things is interesting.

The US has had commercialisation through the Plaids of this world for years.

They’ve already built the commercial relationships with every single bank in the US.

Section 1033 and all those things relate to commercialisation there.

There doesn’t need to be the same level of openness to make it work because America works on commercial agreements.

We’ve seen Visa’s decision to exit the US market.

I’m saying exit because we don’t know it’s going to be an exit until they really exit.

What do you think that tells us about the rest of the world when it looks like one of the biggest markets wants to pull out?

Back to what I said about commercialisation, maybe that’s already there.

Maybe they’re worried about not having market share and bringing their previous investments across Europe over there and making them work when the likes of Plaid, MX, Akoya and Finicity are already established.

Finicity has a greater share than Visa, and that’s a Mastercard company.

Maybe they don’t want to be seen as competing and losing.

I can’t really speak for what their broader strategy is, but again, it’s been commercialised. There are mainstays there that work really well right now.

Maybe it’s just not Visa’s game to play in all of that.

There’s also everything that’s happening in the States.

We were all positive last year at Money20/20 Las Vegas. Section 1033 had just passed, and there was the notion that the Financial Data Exchange would start enforcing standards.

Then we come into a Trump presidency, and it’s not necessarily open banking. You just get rid of lots and lots of government departments.

All of a sudden, Section 1033 is weakened.

Maybe players like Visa just want some stability in regulation.

It was five-plus years in the making, and then overnight it was just gone.

But look how long it took the UK to standardise.

TrueLayer, Tink and Yapily have all spent inordinate amounts of money to get the banks to conform to what effectively is a standard, but they’re all very different.

They’re putting a normalisation layer on top of the banks doing various different things.

Try doing that at an even greater scale.

We’ve got nine big banks we care about in the UK. Try to do that in the US. It’s wild.

Germany as well. When you look at German institutions, you’ve always got the big banks, but then federal state by federal state there are thousands of banks in Germany.

This is quite a scale challenge.

It’s probably the same in the US.

There are some providers, like Volt, that seem to be doing quite a good job in putting up the rails for businesses to use their platform.

Tom has done a really good job in trying to push the standardisation forward for PSPs.

We’ve been more niche than Volt in a lot of respects.

There’s also the challenge of making all of that normal.

They said they were going into the US but didn’t really make it work in the short term for exactly the same reasons that Visa is a little bit concerned about the whole thing.

Bringing FedNow and RTP together in one unit is a valiant way forward.

Putting those together under one integration as well.

The US is still challenging. It’s expensive.

FedNow is tens of cents. I won’t talk about commercial rates with parties, but compared with the cost of ACH being so low, premiums are now charged for instant payments.

We need a bit of time for everyone to realise that the playing field is being levelled, and then to bring those costs down to be on a par with either a cheaper card payment or with something like an older equivalent.

You’ve obviously moved to the US as well. You’ve launched an office out there.

What does the US market look like for Yaspa in terms of your growth and focus, with all the moving parts you’ve mentioned?

We talked about the regulated market generally.

One thing the US offers is the commercial nature of consented data.

That has been weakened somewhat, but let’s hope it holds.

We’ve got the ability to get more data from the US banking system than you get from the UK.

If premium data happens and we commercialise it, great, but there’s a bigger market opportunity there with deeper data.

We then have lots of different types of rails, all the variants of same-day and next-day payments.

We need to work towards a guaranteed offering.

We spend a lot of time in Europe making SEPA credit transfers, for instance.

We take a lot of risk on our transactions. We poll banks and look at state-change messages.

From all we know, with levels of certainty, what the settlement time will look like.

We will do the same thing in the US.

There is a big opening there for what we already do in Europe to take into the regulated gaming sector, for example.

We just took on a $12 million investment round purely to stand up the US.

That’s one opportunity, and there’s lots of other stuff going on.

Obviously, the GENIUS Act passed. Crypto is growing and stablecoin offerings are going to be growing over the next year.

We see the US as an evolution in our journey.

It’s not necessarily going to be the main pillar in the next year, but I think a lot of cool things are happening to support where we want to go.

Playing into those sectors where growth exists is the right call.

We’ve seen open banking providers focus on shiny retail brands, the things they think are the best poster children for a case study, to show they’re doing well in the sector even though they’re not making any money.

You can actually say the AISP side of things is about monetisation.

Plaid probably doesn’t get enough credit for what it has done, particularly in the States.

You talked about Trustly and gambling.

You guys are focusing on gaming and gambling and then monetising AISP data.

Why shouldn’t we be doing that in the UK in terms of some of the stuff it drives?

KYC onboarding solutions for financial services businesses.

You’ve got accessibility to lending for people who maybe wouldn’t get that facility without the benefits of open banking.

Why not put a price on that?

We get charged quite often in the payments world that payments are too expensive.

Being able to tap a card and get that money the same day or next day is not far off open banking these days.

There are real tangible benefits to the card payment ecosystem, and it’s always “drive that price lower, drive that price lower”.

Not just on a payment, but on the AIS side of things.

Your bank identity is probably more qualified than the passport you pull out, whether it’s AI-faked or otherwise.

I tried early in the journey to see if I could create a passport for myself, and I could. You can’t now on most of the major platforms.

But you can get James Neville, one Long Street, London, from the bank. That’s generally a better representation than a passport.

Then the deeper part you get from someone’s transaction history is effectively financial health.

You’ve got stronger, earlier signals of someone’s degrading credit standing or financial health than before the credit reference agencies see it.

You can see somebody’s regular card payments or loan payments.

Did they stop? Have they repaid the loan, or did they miss a payment? What was their balance at that moment in time?

You can start to see all these early indicators.

Given we’re very deeply in the iGaming sector, we recognise there’s a lot of concern around harmful behaviour as well.

We’re able to look at somebody’s transaction history and determine whether they have had changes in behaviour in their depositing.

Has that influenced other factors in their spend? Are they gambling or gaming within disposable income?

There’s a big difference between someone who has £10,000 in their bank account and is gambling £100, and someone who has £500 and is doing the same.

Regulators in the UK and the Netherlands are all moving towards what we call an affordability regime.

It’s valiant and probably the right thing to do because there are a handful of people, as a fraction of a per cent, who do have gambling addiction.

How do you notice that earlier? How do you figure out that somebody has started to change behaviour, and alert yourselves as an operator and them to the fact they should cool down?

I think that’s quite a good space to go.

Affordability in Europe has been very much about hard limits.

Let’s make sure you only gamble €200 in a month, or €400 depending on your age range.

That’s very different between someone with €400 in their account and someone with €4,000.

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Merchants, though, if you’re collecting payments, whether it’s via sweeping in the future or even card payments, I’d be using AISP right now to see that customer’s data.

Can they afford for us to attempt to take that payment tomorrow?

If they cannot because the money is not in the bank, I should be communicating with that consumer and saying, “Hi James, you’ve got a payment of X amount coming out tomorrow. If you are struggling, please contact us.”

You know that customer doesn’t have the money in the bank.

Not only are you looking after your customer, you’re also saving yourself fees.

One hundred per cent.

The same with direct debits in this country.

Exactly the same.

I haven’t managed my current account, and I’ve bought something, and then suddenly the direct debit comes out the next day.

There’s all that kind of stuff you go through.

In the US, it’s slightly different because you’re making a payment within a number of days.

Even same-day could be the next day.

You don’t know the current balance. You don’t know if somebody has done previous returns.

You can do a quick scan of the bank account and determine the risk against that transaction.

Do we need to, though?

It’s a great point, but the consumer has to give their permission at some point.

In the world of Brits particularly, there is a fear of sharing some of our data.

We seem a little bit more reserved than other parts of the world.

“That’s my gambling money. Don’t touch it.”

The US is unfettered. They have a different approach to data.

Over here, we tried an ID card in the Blair era. We put it out there and everyone firmly resisted it.

I think that goes all the way back to the Second World War if we trace its origins.

In Estonia, you can just do digital ID and no one really cares. It’s seen as a benefit.

A lot of the earlier open banking journeys were about explicit consent.

When you went through the journey, it said, “I’m going to interrogate your bank account for balance, transactions and so on, for this singular purpose.”

It’s a big wall of text and it’s like terms and conditions. It’s quite scary.

The word “consent” is quite a scary word. It’s not like authority or approval. Consent is an awkward word that we don’t use very often in lots of contexts.

I think we got some of that wrong in open banking and made it quite complicated for people when we didn’t really need to.

Is there a marketing reason for that? Have we marketed open banking?

Calling it open banking for a start.

Pay by bank is better for the payment element.

We always talk about walking down the street and asking ten people what open banking is.

They have no clue.

Then you explain that they probably paid their credit card off last month using it, and they say, “Oh, that’s open banking.”

We all live in a little bubble where it seems nice, and open finance seems helpful and useful.

Ask a self-employed person what open banking is. They might not know what it is, but they used it in January.

Equally, I don’t want my bank to be open.

I don’t want my bank to be open.

The language around some of this is a little bit wonky.

We’ve covered the US. Great geographic expansion for you there, and congratulations on the raise as well.

Exciting times for the business.

Add to that a new office opening in a city that’s very close to my heart, where I studied and met my wife.

You’ve honed in on Leeds.

Thank you very much. I actually lost my wedding ring on a beach the other day, so I’m not in the good books.

I’m dealing with the insurance company at the moment. Get some open banking involved for the payout there.

In terms of Leeds itself, Manchester’s little sibling potentially, Manchester always gets the attention as the northern powerhouse.

There are some amazing companies based in Leeds.

Explain that decision. Why Leeds? What does that bring for you as a business opening up shop?

I don’t think it’s just Leeds, although we’ve just made a big investment in scaling a team there.

It goes all the way back to the start of the business.

In the really early days, coronavirus had just hit.

We asked, “What is the point of having everybody centralised in an expensive office in London?”

Luckily, our lease had run out, so we decided not to renew it and to go fully remote.

We were meeting people in Victoria Park in east London, playing Frisbee with each other, having a couple of drinks and getting together a couple of times every month.

Then we realised, if you’re going to behave like this, why would we hire just in London?

Why not hire somewhere else?

Our head of product is in Manchester. Our CFO is in Manchester. Our head of compliance was in Manchester, although she has just moved.

We thought, okay, that works. People are good at working remotely and coming together.

Then we said, where would we set up a new office?

There’s a good tech cluster in Leeds as a consequence of the gaming sector being one of them.

Comparing that with London, where we can hire, it’s expensive.

You’re now fighting with the banks because the banks opened up remote working for everyone and are going back on their old selves now.

Unfortunately, people want to work one day a week in the office, but they still want London rates, which seems like a really awkward way to behave.

You’ve got tech teams where some of them want to come in and some of them don’t.

Why would you not just go somewhere else and see if you can set up another cluster?

There’s a big tech undertaking over there at the moment, so we figured that was the right thing to do.

We had a couple of people already working in the area and we scaled it up.

We’ll see how it goes.

I’m a Yorkshireman by birth. I’m a Middlesbrough lad. You wouldn’t tell by my accent, apologies for that, but I have Yorkshire there in my heart.

Very good.

There’s definitely a bit of a fintech hub opening up in that part of the world.

When I was there, Sky Bet had a big office. They did an incubator programme with Sheffield University, I think, with graduate schemes mainly focusing on techies and product-orientated people.

They had that emerging talent pool available at their disposal.

Direct Line and Channel 4 are there. There are some really big brands you’re going to be in and amongst in Leeds.

It’s great for the area to have another great employer opening up there.

Thank you.

Looking across the next 12 to 18 months, with your new offices being open and the investment, what do you think will be the biggest challenges for you and the industry over the next year or two?

There’s a mix of stuff going on.

Across Europe, you’ve got the mandate for SEPA Instant. That could be a real benefit for all of us.

It could equally be another fight that we all have for two years.

You’ve got PSD3 normalising some of that. Let’s see what the adoption of that looks like.

It’s commercial time, isn’t it, PSD3?

There’ll be consultants out there rubbing their hands with PSD3, won’t there?

I started this business when PSD2 was just about to be a thing, and it still took another two or three years.

There’s a lot of stuff happening in the UK with respect to commercial VRP.

Without a dispute model and all the things that normally go with schemes and direct debit, that’s going to be a challenge for anyone.

VRP doesn’t feature too much in our world over here right now.

Let’s get your take on commercial VRP and where we stand at the moment.

We’re back into “it’s coming again”. There are more banks signed up now.

What’s the reality?

I haven’t seen the engagement I’d like to see.

I’m going to let everybody else follow and figure it out because it’s not the strongest use case for us just yet.

I still think it’s a while away.

Like I said, dispute management and all those other things have to hang together.

There was a point where Visa and Mastercard were playing around with various different schemes.

They approached us and we’ve all talked.

Maybe there’s an apathy towards wanting an existing card scheme to run a scheme for A2A.

There’s lots of everybody being a bit protective and cautious at the moment.

For us, we’ll focus on the US.

That’s a big enough challenge while we see where the dust settles in Europe.

What are your thoughts, Grant, on commercial VRPs?

I think it’s quite well known what my thoughts are on commercial VRPs.

I still think we’re at this stage of certain individuals making out like it’s very imminent and it’s going to replace direct debit.

I just don’t see it happening for a long time.

Direct debit payments still make up seven in ten recurring payments in the UK.

They still grow month on month. They’re an established solution. Consumers know it, they trust it, and there’s protection that exists with it.

Elements of what we’ve seen deployed as so-called commercial VRP are an initial open banking payment that rolls into a standing order.

It’s not truly utilising open banking.

Where we first talked about it, the combination of trusted beneficiaries with limits and being able to say this merchant can do up to £100, or you can do it with a prescribed frequency, and people can manage that with consents within the app experience.

Any changes to that are possible.

We’re not anywhere near close to that.

Personally, I wouldn’t want unfettered direct debit access to my bank account.

A fixed direct debit for the same amount is fine, but an open-ended book and VRP? I don’t think so.

My biggest concern with commercial VRPs is that we’re trying to build a product that may not be needed in the industry because you have direct debit, standing orders and card payments.

Why would you need a different way?

I think the problem with direct debits and standing orders is the process to establish and change them.

It’s the mandate that’s hard.

It’s not flexible, and nobody has really gone to the level of being able to change that mandate or adjust it in real time.

That was the promise of VRP, moving those limits around.

We’ll get there, but it’s a little bit of a hammer looking for a nail at the moment.

Absolutely.

I’d be surprised if I see it this year, but I’ve seen so many businesses say it’s coming this year.

I’m also interested to see what a simple use case is because I don’t know what a simple use case is.

I guess the simplest one is a SaaS subscription.

You’re on one tier and you shift to another, and you don’t want a different direct debit mandate.

That’s niche, though.

There are a lot of payments in SaaS that people would prefer not to put against a card.

Do they prefer not to be against the card?

We do as a business, 100 per cent.

Some of them go against my card and some are against someone else’s tech expenses card.

It’s an absolute mess.

If we could squash that down, it would be much better, and then manage all of that within your corporate business treasury account.

That makes sense.

Do you think the next stage is going to be driven more by banks and fintechs, or merchants themselves?

I don’t think it’s banks.

Apologies to anyone out there from a bank.

They haven’t really pushed innovation forward.

We’ve got desires as fintechs for things to be better.

A lot of it isn’t really new features. It’s about similar capabilities, standardisation and normalisation.

There’s always a big push for that.

On the merchant side, we have lots of demands for various different things that we can do right now.

Obvious ones would be reverse payments.

Can we combine AIS on a reverse payment? That would be the most fantastic thing in the world.

It was on the roadmap many moons ago and suddenly disappeared for us.

There are little things like that.

Pushing app-to-app redirection in Europe would be fantastic.

That’s the stuff that gets conversion numbers higher, and conversion numbers drive merchant acceptance.

Cost and good conversion.

At the moment, there are pockets of good conversion in certain countries and poor ones in others.

Merchants look at it and see a fragmented way of taking payment for certain markets.

You could be seen as being an APM of choice for certain areas, but in others they would just rely on cards.

Until we’ve got that conversion standardisation and ubiquity that I think PSD3 will start enforcing, I don’t think you’ll get much pull from merchants.

You’ll get it more from the fintechs.

We were talking over coffee before, as you mentioned Europe, around some of the challenges in the European market.

EPI and Wero, and what they’re looking to build, obviously taps into a lot of A2A payment methods.

What sort of challenges do you think they’re going to face on that journey to create a single payment wallet across all of Europe?

Lots.

Security generally is probably going to be the strongest thing.

Are we going to go back to AIS to all the banks and a standard there?

The banks are all challenged with new ways of doing things generally.

It’s going to be about everybody agreeing to stuff at the end of the day.

Consensus across the sector.

I think we’re far from consensus on even the basics right now.

It will get built. It will slowly get built, but I think it’s going to take closer to a decade rather than a few years.

There is momentum in open banking, and it is moving.

More people are starting to understand it who maybe didn’t understand it six, 12 or 18 months ago.

Do you think regulators are stopping that momentum, or do you think they will improve their speed for the rest of the industry to get things moving a little quicker?

The only thing regulators have to give is making sure that banks and the sector generally conform to normalised behaviour.

That’s the best thing they can do.

Again, PSD3 is trying to do some of that.

I think the regulator needs to think about what an independent scheme looks like for dispute management.

That’s been a big hole for a long time.

Then there’s what we do in the UK with respect to premium data, data security, consent and data sharing.

What does that all mean?

The banks aren’t going to figure that out for themselves. They’re going to leave it well alone.

Unless a regulator comes at it from the perspective of determining that the banks do not own customer data, the customer owns that data, it won’t move.

The regulator can make that more portable in the same way that they made switching accounts portable as the initial driver from the CMA9 and open banking.

That’s the role they’ve got to play.

They’re underfunded. They’re looking at all kinds of other things.

Getting another OBIE that has some teeth all the way across Europe is a very tall ask right now, but I’d love it to happen.

What are your thoughts on orchestration platforms for open banking? Do you think that is a thing?

To an extent, we do an element of it.

That’s what Volt does as its main thing.

It puts together PIX with RTP and FedNow.

We do orchestration of orchestration as well.

In those markets where we don’t have direct bank connectivity because we’re not an infrastructure player, we use all the main aggregators.

We will route some traffic through one and some traffic through another.

I think there’s a lot of merit in that because some people have better integrations with the banks.

Don’t ask me why, but some people have higher conversion.

Everyone has done it slightly differently.

Again, it would be really helpful if we all did it the same way.

We have an orchestration platform that allows us to use other TPPs ourselves.

We have various different ways of doing an AIS and PIS journey.

We don’t do it the same way in every country.

In fact, we don’t do it the same way with every bank.

That’s flow optimisation, though, right?

Yes.

You’ve touched on elements of it, but if we look at the road ahead for Yaspa and where the business is going, what are your biggest opportunities over the next few years?

Given some of the challenges we’ve talked about, regulation, different markets and the US, if you’re achieving your vision for the business over the next few years, where does that see you go?

It sees us going into lots of different verticals.

There’s a mental roadmap for me.

Firstly, it’s about regulation and bank capability.

Secondly, consumer education and adoption.

Thirdly, how the rails develop in certain geographies.

Africa is a hugely appealing market. Asia as well.

We’ve already seen how fragmented Europe alone is without trying to bring the whole of Africa or the whole of Asia together in one piece.

I’ll ask you about Latin America because you’ve named some continents.

Latin America is driving towards PIX.

Unless we just become a PIX orchestrator, they’ve already done that at a national level.

We might see other countries do that at a national level.

Again, do we want to be an instant-payments orchestrator or not?

We can be.

There’s more that we do outside of a Faster Payment or a PIX payment that brings that whole journey together as part of our general USP.

You’re starting to see PIX-type proliferation across Latin America.

In a way, you’ve got to be led by the regulators, banks and schemes.

Look at what Canada is doing.

Vocalink is driving the real-time rail that was supposed to be ready last year. It’s probably going to be another year from here.

What does that look like?

Is that Interac? Is it independent? What does it look like?

Can we add value by pulling that together with some of the other aspects we do?

We don’t know just yet.

When we set out to build this business, we looked at things like BankID as a beautiful way, although very limited in reach to a single country, to bring together all the things you’d want to do online, from a narrow funnel all the way through to a payment.

The more ubiquitous I can make that internationally, the more we achieve one of my core goals.

A quick question, completely off topic.

Yaspa. What does Yaspa mean?

It’s “pay ASAP”. It’s an anagram of that.

We threw a lot of stuff into the mix.

We had a big whiteboarding session and a whole wall full of sticky notes.

We started with the kinds of things people liked, including expressions.

I think one of them was somebody’s name, which got included in it.

Then we got the acronym out of it.

I think it was one of our staff members. Her nickname is Yas, or at least the start of her name is Yas.

That went up on the wall. Pay went up on the wall.

When you start putting all these things together, you come up with something.

I’m as surprised as anyone else that Yaspa as a five-letter domain name was available.

I’d be surprised at that as well.

You mentioned the open banking industry and where you want Yaspa to go.

What do you want Yaspa to be known as in the role of open banking in the future?

For us, it’s about connecting identity and money.

That’s been our north star ever since.

It’s about creating a single way to make a verified payment in less than ten seconds, ubiquitously.

Fantastic.

Before we go, James, one of our favourite parts of the show, the Shelf of Shame.

From your perspective, what would you like to bring to the Shelf of Shame?

We’ll make the decision whether we banish it forever or allow it to carry on in the worlds of payments and fintech.

Not buy now, pay later particularly, but the application of buy now, pay later.

Having something like that on Just Eat makes me uncomfortable.

Sometimes I don’t want to pay £50 for a takeaway because I’ve spent a lot of money this month, and the kids aren’t going to get it. They’re going to get fish fingers or whatever we normally do as a family.

But buy now, pay later on a £50 takeaway disturbs me.

That kind of low-value commodity sale and the application of it absolutely needs to go on the Shelf of Shame.

The use of buy now, pay later for small items, particularly consumables?

Yes.

It’s an interesting one.

Someone within the finance sector once mentioned a single mother with three children who has just had a newborn and is deciding whether she puts nappies on buy now, pay later.

That’s wild.

It sounds crazy.

However, and this is the point, those nappies may be on special offer today.

Buying a big pack and spreading it out could make sense.

Most retailers are looking at it for a reason because they want to try and help people.

I’m not a big fan, but we could go down the rabbit hole.

I think that one will come up quite a lot.

We’re quite happy to put that on the Shelf of Shame.

I would agree with that as well.

To conclude, where can people find you on social media, get in touch and find out more about Yaspa?

We’re at [www.yaspa.com](http://www.yaspa.com).

You’ll find us on Instagram and LinkedIn, and all the usual channels.

You’ll find me, James Neville, on LinkedIn.

If anyone has anything interesting to talk about, I’m happy to connect and happy to chat.

Feel free to reach out.

Brilliant. Perfect. Thanks very much.

You’re more than welcome. Thank you.