The award-winning fintech that uses Open Banking to provide payment and verification services, Yaspa, has announced it has received a government grant from Innovate UK, a national innovation agency.
The latter is a sub-division of UK Research and Innovation, which is a government-funded body that invests £8 billion ($10.1 billion) of taxpayer’s money into different projects every year.
With the help of the undisclosed funding amount, former Worldpay chief technology officer James Neville’s firm plans on further developing its safer gambling payments and AI platform.
Operators Will Enjoy Enhanced Affordability Checks
Yaspa aims to use the funds to collaborate with academics across the fields of safer gambling and AI and create a platform that will enable players to complete their deposits via “non-disruptive, real-time risk detection” procedures.
In turn, operators can expect to benefit from better affordability checks by identifying vulnerable customers with more ease.
By immediately accessing player transaction data right at the time of their deposits and employing AI, operators will enjoy higher chances of detecting risk in customers.
Yaspa’s statement detailed that, by including payment data in the process, they should provide “a frictionless way to conduct affordability checks that go beyond current consumer protection initiatives” like paper-based affordability checks or reliance on data from within the domain of a single operator.
Yaspa further explained that the development of the platform should assist operators with identifying and addressing some of the “300,000 estimated problem gamblers” in the UK.
The Grant Will Play a “Pivotal Role”
As explained by Yaspa’s chief executive officer and co-founder, James Neville, the grant should enable them to play a “pivotal role in the future of compliance within the gambling sector.”
He further explained that their safer gambling platform will strive to reinterpret the way affordability checks are done and used to enhance protection for vulnerable players by employing these fast-growing technologies.
Neville added that, at the moment, operators regard players “at the single operator level” while relying on disruptive checks that pose the risk of sending people to grey markets.
Yaspa hopes that the mix of its “frictionless process“ and a pan-operator view would help it completely change the experience for both players and operators.
The London-based fintech has already received the support of Fin Capital, SGH Capital, and Metavallon VC.
At the moment, the company that started in 2017 as “Citizen,” a company that wishes to connect identity and payments, collaborates with Delasport, Novibet, and White Hat Gaming.
Last month, the UK’s gambling minister spoke about the plans to change the gambling industry, emphasizing the need for additional treatment and prevention measures to stop gambling harm.