Yaspa partners with The Big Leagues to bring instant open banking payments to UK sports prize draws

Yaspa has integrated its Intelligent Payments solution with The Big Leagues, the UK sports prize draw and fan engagement platform. For high-risk operators, the interesting part is not the branding; it is the combination of Pay by Bank deposits and withdrawals with automated player verification in one flow.

1. The Big Leagues has implemented Yaspa’s open banking-based payments stack to handle fast, secure deposits and withdrawals, while also automating player verification. Yaspa says the setup combines instant bank transfers with real-time account authentication, so operators can verify identity and process deposits in seconds rather than pushing players through a card-heavy onboarding flow.
2. The pitch here is familiar to anyone running a payments stack in a regulated vertical: less administrative friction, no card fees, and less drop-off than with legacy payment gateways. Yaspa’s model is built on open banking infrastructure and augmented with artificial intelligence, which is exactly the kind of plumbing that matters when payment speed and KYC-style checks need to happen together.
3. The Big Leagues launched earlier this year as a multi-sport destination for British fans, with free-to-play sports prediction games and premium prize draws for prizes including VIP hospitality at the UEFA Champions League, Cheltenham Festival, and the Masters. The platform is led by industry veteran Adam Shaw and says it puts player trust and regulatory integrity at the core of its operations, following the voluntary code of good practice and promoting robust governance in the emerging prize draw sector.
4. Yaspa’s CEO James Neville said the partnership is meant to let The Big Leagues offer “effortless, instant transactions” while keeping verification and trust behind the scenes. Adam Shaw, founder of The Big Leagues, framed the same point more plainly: trust, speed, and simplicity are the target, and the goal is to remove the usual friction from the payments journey without weakening security.
5. The announcement also fits Yaspa’s recent awards run. In 2026 so far, it has been named Best Payment Solution Provider at the European iGaming Awards and Payment Solution of the Year at the SBC Awards. In June, it won two EGR B2B Awards — AI Solutions Provider and Safer Gambling Supplier — and was also named one of CB Insights’ Top 100 Fintechs.

For PSPs and operators in sports betting-adjacent or prize draw models, this is a neat example of where open banking is heading in practice: not just as a cheaper rail, but as part of the onboarding and verification stack. That matters when the business wants instant funding, cleaner identity checks, and fewer users abandoning the process halfway through.