In a recent post, Yaspa’s US Gaming Lead, Peter Kula, argued that the prediction market operators that endure won’t be the ones that innovate fastest. They’ll be the ones that earn trust first—with the people using them, and eventually with the regulators who arrive to govern them.

It’s a claim that invites a fair question: where does an operator actually start?

The answer is the part of the business that touches every user, every day, and that operators can fix right now without waiting for anyone’s permission—payments.

The work you can do today

Every prediction platform has to get two payment jobs right: funding deposits reliably and at low cost, and paying participants out fast when a market resolves. Get those wrong and nothing else matters. Get them right and you’ve built the foundation everything else sits on.

Deposits are the harder of the two. The Automated Clearing House (ACH) network is cheap and reaches almost every bank account in the country, but it was built for batch processing—payments can take days to clear, and a meaningful share fail or get returned after the fact, typically because the account is short of funds or has been closed, and sometimes because the payment is fraudulent. For a high-velocity, event-based platform, that’s both a cash-flow problem and a fraud problem.

Guaranteed ACH changes the economics. Instead of waiting to learn whether a payment clears, a funding decision is made before the deposit is approved—but how that decision gets made varies significantly. At the basic end, a provider might rely on historic account data or a pre-set spending limit. At the more sophisticated end, the check happens in real time at the point of deposit: live balance and account ownership are verified, and open banking data is used to build a picture of the user’s financial position before a yes or no is issued. The stronger the decisioning, the more meaningful the guarantee—because the provider is taking on the return liability, they have every incentive to get that call right. It’s worth being precise about what this is: instant decisioning, not instant settlement. The participant gets an answer immediately and can start trading; the money settles over the ACH rails behind the scenes. In regulated US gaming, Yaspa approves 85% to 90% of these payments (Yaspa data), which keeps good users moving without waving away the risk.

Funding straight from the customer’s bank account—what’s often called account-to-account, or Pay by Bank—also fills a gap that’s opening anyway. Card deposits carry processing costs and the ever-present risk of chargebacks, and across real-money gaming they’re being withdrawn: the major US sportsbooks have dropped credit-card deposits, and several states have written that into law. An account-to-account deposit sidesteps both problems—lower cost to process, and no chargebacks to manage after the fact.

There’s a second job a deposit can quietly do: confirm who’s behind it. A bank-verified deposit checks that the account funding a market actually belongs to the person using it, which closes off a common route for fraud and account takeover before any money moves. For a product built on event outcomes—where the integrity of who is participating matters as much as how much—that verification at the point of funding is doing important work.

Deposits are only half the job. Payouts are where prediction markets can win loyalty outright. When a market resolves, participants expect their money—not in three to five days, but now. Instant payouts run over the Real-Time Payments (RTP) and FedNow rails, both of which settle around the clock. Fast, reliable withdrawals are one of the clearest trust signals a platform can send, and they cost far less to deliver than most operators assume.

Underneath both sits reconciliation. Event-based markets are bursty by nature—volume spikes around a game, an election, a verdict—and deposits and payouts need to stay cleanly aligned even when activity is at its highest. It’s unglamorous work, but it’s the difference between scaling smoothly and scaling into problems.

None of this is future technology. It’s available now, it’s cost-effective, and it’s robust. Operators can put it in place today and feel the benefit in conversion, in payout speed, and in the quality of the users they approve.

Will open banking reach enough of your users?

It’s the first question any US operator should ask, and a fair one—open banking only helps if it covers the people actually funding your markets. In practice, the coverage is already there. Yaspa reaches more than 95% of US consumer demand deposit accounts, and close to three-quarters of deposits at the country’s largest institutions flow through the most secure, app-based bank connections. Reach at that level is what lets an operator commit to account-to-account as the default way to move money, in and out — rather than running it for some users and patching the gap with the card rails everyone is otherwise trying to move away from. The app-based connections matter too: users agree to share their bank account information inside their own banking app, which is more secure and more reliable than older methods, so more deposits actually complete. And coverage is the precondition for the rest of this post: guaranteed deposits, instant payouts and insight at the point of funding only count if they reach almost all of your users, not a slice of them.

The part you can’t see yet, but can prepare for

Here’s the part that’s easy to defer, and the part it pays to get ahead of. The thread that connects it to everything above is open banking itself: the technology you’d adopt today for cheaper deposits and faster payouts are the same ones tomorrow’s compliance obligations will run on. Get the payments right now, and you’re already most of the way to being ready for what comes next.

That earlier post made the case that prediction markets are scaling like consumer products while being governed like institutional financial tools, and that the gap between the two is where consumer-protection risk sits. We won’t go back over exactly how or when the space gets regulated. But the direction of travel is hard to ignore.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is advancing open banking rules under Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act, which would give consumers a clear right to share their financial data securely with the providers they choose—putting the very model these payments rely on onto firmer regulatory ground. At the same time, more states are writing safer-gambling expectations into law across real-money gaming. You don’t have to predict the precise shape of prediction-market regulation to see where this lands: at some point, operators will be expected to manage onboarding and ongoing checks—affordability, identity, and source of funds among them.

What those checks look for is also where open banking earns its place. A platform that can see a user’s financial context—with their consent—is in a far better position to tell its audiences apart. Prediction markets draw sophisticated traders, sports bettors priced out of licensed books, and casual users arriving from social media, and each group carries a different risk profile. Real-time insight at the point of deposit helps a platform distinguish them, surface the right information to the right user, and spot funding patterns that point to excessive participation before they become a problem—the kind of early, dynamic intervention that static onboarding checks miss.

There’s a practical worry buried in all of this: more checks usually mean more friction, and more friction means fewer completed deposits. Open banking insight at the moment of payment is how you avoid that trade-off. The data you need is gathered in the same consented step that funds the account, rather than through a separate onboarding gate that sends users away. You get the insight without taxing conversion to get it.

This is where the two halves of this post meet. The same open banking connection that lets you take a guaranteed deposit can, with the user’s consent, surface the very insights those checks call for—identity, source of funds, and affordability signals—at the moment of deposit. That’s what we mean by Intelligent Payments: the intelligence is built into the payment, not bolted on afterward.

The practical implication is the bit worth holding onto. If you adopt this payment infrastructure for the commercial reasons that already make sense today—cheaper deposits, faster payouts, better users—you also happen to be standing on the rails that future obligations will run on. You’re not buying compliance software you don’t yet need. You’re choosing a way of moving money that’s ready for the checks when they come.

Where this leaves operators

That’s what future-proofing actually looks like in this market. Not a big bet on a regulatory outcome no one can call yet, but a set of payment choices that pay for themselves now and leave you ahead of the curve later.

The prediction markets that last will be the ones that built trust into the foundation. The payments layer is the most concrete place to start.

At Yaspa, this is what we do for high-velocity, regulated platforms—guaranteed deposits, instant payouts, and real-time insight in a single flow. If you’d like to see how it works, book a meeting with one of our experts.