Yaspa's real-time bank payments (Pay by Bank) underpin millions of transactions every year. Our fast and simple payments, payouts and account verification services are available as discrete modules, or can be blended with AI to create Intelligent Payments: seamless transactions that deliver verified customer insights. These insights allow businesses to spot new opportunities, bad actors and those at risk. Customers benefit from a frictionless payment process, while merchants can tailor risk and lifecycle management to each individual profile, in real time.

Introduction to Yaspa

Yaspa launched in 2017 under the name Citizen, founded by former Worldpay CTO, James Neville, with the aim of exploring the intersection between identity and money. Since then, we’ve grown into an award-winning Banking as a Service platform, helping businesses across the UK and Europe make and receive payments, and providing unique customer insights to build trust and reduce risk. You can find out more about the company on our website, here.

Instant payments:

With Yaspa, a business will typically embed Yaspa payment flows directly into their website, app, or terminal, usually on a checkout page. When the customer clicks the 'Pay with Yaspa' button, we send a secure link to a Yaspa payment journey, enabling the end customer to make a direct Pay by Bank (account-to-account) payment through their mobile banking app, straight to the business' account. This is a Yaspa Instant Pay-in.

The journey is fast and frictionless - the customer does not need to input any data or download any apps. Funds typically settle instantly, travelling over the Faster Payments network in the UK and SEPA Instant in Europe. Yaspa sees ASPSP conversion rates as high as 85–95%.

Account verification:

A similar process can be deployed for customers to simply verify their bank accounts, without actually making a payment. This checks their account details, and allows merchants to use these verified account details to make closed-loop payments.

Real-time insights:

At the same time, Yaspa may ask for the customer's consent to access their bank transactions. If permitted to do so, we can then deliver insights to the business regarding their customer's financial health and risk profile. This allows the business to respond to the customer in a manner appropriate to the customer's financial circumstances (for example, setting trading limits or providing rewards) in a way that is timely and considered. These insights are delivered by Yaspa's Intelligent Payments solution.

Yaspa also provides payout functionality - for money flowing from a business to a customer - and virtual bank accounts (vIBANs). For more information on how all these products work, see our Product overview page and the detailed documentation.

What is open banking?

None of this could happen without the open banking framework: a common set of programmatic APIs for interacting with banks, providing PIS and access to AIS. These APIs are open in nature and all major banks in the UK, and most banks in Europe, support these APIs - as was mandated by the EU in its second Payment Services Directive (PSD2).

Open banking allows third-party financial services, such as Yaspa, to use a set of open APIs to initiate pay-ins on a customer's behalf or securely access customer data from their banks. Customers must approve these payments, or grant explicit consent for their account information through their banking app.

The open banking APIs require licences to use them and are overseen by the following authorities:

• UK – Open Banking Limited (formerly the OBIE) oversees the implementation and development of open banking standards and issues licences, with the FCA having oversight over the process.
• EU – The EBA implements and develops open banking standards and issues licences, with each country’s national competent authorities (NCAs) being responsible for enforcing the regulations.

To learn more see Open banking.

Using Yaspa documentation

We hope you'll find everything you need here for a clear and simple integration. We welcome all feedback, so if you have any questions or would like more information, please get in touch with your Customer Success Manager, or use the Slack channel set up during onboarding.