The best payment experience is one you won’t notice: designing Yaspa with Tommy

When a consumer reaches Yaspa, they’re in the middle of a payment. They want it done quickly so they can get on with what they were doing. Every screen they see between the payments page and their banking app is a chance to build trust – or lose it.

Tommy Wakeham is the person responsible for those screens. As Yaspa’s Product Designer, he makes sure every digital experience we build is intuitive and easy to use. He’s also one of our longest-serving team members, having joined seven years ago.

We sat down with Tommy to talk about how Yaspa has changed, how our payment journey has developed and what it takes to design a payment experience people trust.

From Citizen to Yaspa: seven years of growth

When Tommy joined, the company was called Citizen. There were about five employees, and the product was a passwordless login and identity platform.

“We pivoted to payments not long after I joined, so looking back, we would look like an entirely different company,” he says. Today, Yaspa has around 75 people.

Tommy joined for the chance to work on an innovative product in a fast-paced start-up, where he knew he would learn a lot. What has kept him here is seeing the company grow and succeed, and playing a part in that. Closing our Series A stands out as a turning point: “That was validation that what we were doing was working and that people trusted the direction we were aiming for.”

Growth has also changed how the team works. “In the early days, we would all be next to each other in the office. If you wanted a meeting with someone, you would swivel your chair around and start talking to them,” Tommy says. “Now we document every decision, every ideation, every meeting. At the start, all the company information was in everyone’s heads, but that doesn’t scale.”

His role has become more focused too. In a small company, everyone helps out wherever they’re needed, so Tommy wore many hats – from QA testing releases to representing Yaspa at events. As we’ve hired specialists, he’s been able to dedicate more of his time to UX.

Designing for trust in the middle of a deposit

Yaspa has three main product surfaces: the end-user payment journeys, the admin dashboard and our internal portal. Each has its own users. On the payment journeys, Tommy is mainly designing for consumers on iGaming sites who want to top up their account to place a bet. With Yaspa, that means selecting their bank and approving the payment in their banking app.

Tommy describes his role as the custodian of that experience. “For me, that means championing the best experience for our users,” he says. “Everyone has an opinion on UX and UI, so it’s about making sure we’re building the best thing for our customers – even if that means going against the opinion of some senior people at Yaspa.”

Because consumers meet Yaspa mid-deposit, trust is the starting point for every design decision. One way Tommy builds it is by answering questions before consumers ask them. For example, someone might wonder whether they entered the right amount on the previous page, so Yaspa reconfirms the amount as soon as they land on our screen.

So what does good look like? “A good payment experience is one you won’t notice at all. Everything works as expected and there are no surprises,” Tommy says. “A bad payment experience is where you don’t know what’s happening with the funds. Has the payment worked? Has the money left my account? Why has it not landed in my gaming account yet?”

Balancing what consumers want with what operators need and what regulation requires takes close teamwork. Tommy works with colleagues across customer success and compliance to make sure he’s solving the right problem in a way that keeps Yaspa compliant.

How the journey got shorter

Yaspa was among the first companies working on open banking payments, so there was no established best practice for the user flow. “Everyone was trying different things,” Tommy says. The core steps were the same as today: consumers select their bank and approve the payment within their bank.

But the first version was twice as long as today’s journey. Operators need the account holder’s verified name for each payment, and Yaspa originally provided it through the data-sharing side of open banking. That meant consumers had to consent to sharing their account name and then consent to the payment – two separate trips to their bank. “As you can imagine, this had quite poor conversion,” Tommy says.

One trip to the bank, not two

To cut the journey down, the team needed another way to give operators the account holder’s name. The answer was integrating with an electronic money institution (EMI), which allowed Yaspa to provide payment accounts to our customers. Once a consumer’s funds land in that account, Yaspa knows the details of the account the money came from.

This meant we could remove the data-sharing step from the payment journey entirely, because we were retrieving the account holder’s name another way. The result was a significant increase in first-time conversion.

From email links to QR codes

Some changes that looked small made a big difference. When consumers pay on their desktop, Yaspa hands them off to their phone so they can approve the payment in their banking app, which is a better experience.

In the early versions, Yaspa sent consumers an email and asked them to open it on their phone. But some opened it on their desktop instead, and conversion suffered. As people became more comfortable with QR codes and phone cameras started scanning them automatically, the team switched to a QR code handoff. It’s much more intuitive and leads to higher conversion on desktop.

Timing the handoff

Not every experiment worked. The team tried handing desktop users over to mobile at the earliest possible moment and saw a large drop-off. “It was too much to ask a first-time user to immediately scan a QR code,” Tommy says.

The lesson draws on Tommy’s background in psychology. A principle called the foot-in-the-door technique holds that when someone agrees to a small request first, they become more likely to agree to a larger one later. So the team lets consumers take small, easy steps on desktop, such as selecting their bank and confirming the final details, before asking them to do the bigger task of getting their phone out and scanning a code.

Expanding into new markets, including the US, has not changed this approach. “The goal is still the same: build a seamless payment experience that users trust and want to use again and again,” Tommy says.

How the team decides what to change

Most new features start with a problem. The team uses both data and feedback to find those problems. Yaspa tracks every button click and page view in Mixpanel, so the team can see where consumers drop off in the journey.

“The analytics show us there is drop-off. They don’t tell us why, which is where the user feedback comes in,” Tommy says.

From there, a change moves from idea to live in a few stages:

1. Tommy works with our product managers to understand the problem behind a feature request.
2. Engineers join early to discuss solutions, because they think about problems from a different perspective.
3. Compliance reviews the shortlisted ideas to rule out anything that will not work from a regulatory point of view.
4. Tommy designs the flows and components in Figma, keeping engineers in the loop.
5. He hands over completed designs with documentation and requirements, and engineers build the feature.
6. After release, the team tracks success metrics, usually in Mixpanel.

Operator feedback is a big part of the process too, especially for the admin dashboard, where operators are the users. The team has built some dashboard features based on their requests. When a request for the payment journey might compromise the consumer experience, it’s about managing the relationship. “Thankfully, they usually trust that we know our users and our journeys best,” Tommy says.

Mobile first, but not mobile only

Over 80% of Yaspa’s users are on mobile, so the team designs mobile first, without neglecting desktop. Testing is central: watching real users complete real tasks with the designs.

AI has also helped the team stay on top of accessibility. “Picking text colours that pass colour contrast ratios is easy,” Tommy says. “But AI can help us find components in the code that don’t follow accessibility best practice, like adding text alternatives for images and making sure screen readers work correctly.”

All of this takes more work than the finished product suggests. “People see the nice-looking final design, but they have not seen the 20 other iterations that didn’t make it,” Tommy says.

What’s next for Yaspa’s payment experience

Right now, Tommy is putting the finishing touches on Yaspa’s US payment flows, and he’s looking forward to seeing them live with customers.

Looking further ahead, he would like to see open banking payments move towards a one-click experience for trusted merchants, instead of confirming in the banking app every time.

His advice for anyone designing a payment experience for the first time is to start with what people already know. “Payment UX is a well-trodden path with established patterns and defined best practice. For a first pass, don’t deviate from these,” he says. He points to Jakob’s Law: users spend most of their time on other websites, so they prefer yours to work the same way as the familiar sites they already use.

Quick-fire with Tommy

Describe Yaspa’s UI in three words. Intentional, clean, intuitive.

The design principle you would never break? Don’t sacrifice legibility and readability for aesthetics.

Favourite screen you’ve designed? The payment success screen, because I get to deliver the good news.

One thing about payments that annoys you as a consumer? Getting one-time passcodes (OTPs) from providers that have already saved my card details. I much prefer using Chrome’s saved card details.

See Yaspa in action

Want to see the payment journey Tommy and the team have built? Book a demo to find out how Yaspa can help your consumers deposit with confidence.