E-Money and Payment Services

The first step in entering the single market for payment services is whether you are issuing E-money or otherwise offering a Payment Service, or whether you benefit from one of the typical exclusions. We can advise on the EEA position generally, as well as under Irish law specifically, and co-ordinate local law advice from key target markets to check for local differences.

If you are a retailer, you should be aware of the need to register certain loyalty and gift card programmes that transact more than €1m in any 12 month period. Ireland also regulates certain gift vouchers.

E-commerce marketplaces have an opportunity to structure themselves in a way that either avoids the need for payments regulation, or creates competitive advantage by offering their own payment services to third party buyers and sellers.

If you wish to use Ireland as your ‘home’ country for offering your e-money or payment services around the EEA, you will need to ensure that you have a genuine presence in Ireland.

When choosing which EEA jurisdiction as your base or branch, it is important to consider local incentives. We can advise on those available in Ireland, and introduce you to Enterprise Ireland and the Irish Development Agency (IDA) as appropriate.

This is a particularly important for exercise if you are a director of a company exposed to the consequences of Brexit, as you must be able to demonstrate that you satisfied your duties in the face of such a major impact on the company’s prospects.

We offer a service for the incorporation of Irish companies, including standard start-up legal documents.

We can provide you with director’s service agreement for both non-executive and executive directors, as well as employment contracts for senior management and other staff and advice on employment law issues generally.

We also advise on corporate immigration, including employment permits.

We can manage your application to the Central Bank of Ireland for authorisation or registration, including reviewing the regulatory business plan and advising on specific Irish law issues associated with your filing and questions from the CBI. We work with a range of regulatory consultants who will cost-effectively handle the administrative aspects of the application.

We draft contracts for the supply of e-money and/or payment services, and advise retailers and e-commerce marketplaces on the changes they need to suit their specific requirements.

We can switch contracts governed by English law and courts to Irish law and courts for Brexit-proofing purposes, including agreeing a new basis for personal data transfers to the UK.

We are also well-versed in the open banking Regulatory Technical Standards for strong customer authentication and secure API access to payment accounts for the supply of Account Information Services and Payment Initiation Services.

We’re also aware that Account Information Services are usually part of broader information services and are used to drafting such agreements.

We are also experienced in drafting the typical agreements required with key suppliers, including cloud service providers, credit reference agencies (for undertaking customer due diligence), banks and other payment or FX service providers.

We can advise on your corporate governance arrangements to ensure the ‘mind and management’ of your Irish subsidiary remains with that entity, as well as drafting or reviewing of your compliance policies.

Safeguarding customer funds is a key operational issue for any e-money or payment service provider, and we have experience in how the regulatory safeguarding rules apply in practice.

Your policies and procedures to combat money laundering and terrorist financing must be ‘risk-based’ and specific to your business, and we can assist with this, particularly in light of the recent expansion in the scope of anti-money laundering regulation.

We are also able to assist you in relation to Data Protection compliance, to help ensure you have the required internal Record of Processing Activities, as well as a customer-facing privacy policy describing the personal data you collect, the purpose of processing, the legal basis for processing. This is particularly important given the need for a new legal basis for transferring any personal data from the EEA to the UK.

It is very important for highly regulated businesses that potential mistakes are recognised and investigated as early as possible, and appropriate notifications are made to customers and regulators in a way that demonstrates a situation has been remedied and brought under control. Our Dispute Resolution team has extensive experience in handling financial regulatory issues.

We have an experienced insolvency, restructuring and examiner team to help where required.