fire.com has today announced that it has been authorised as an e-money institution in the UK to provide a range of payment services, changing the way businesses pay and get paid.
Following the decision of the UK to leave the EU, fire.com embarked on a journey to ensure its customers and its own ability to scale would be secured, no matter the outcome of Brexit. As a provider of payment services, primarily to businesses, fire.com has been regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland since 2010 as a Payments Institution. It was re-authorised in 2018, when new payments regulation took effect. Now as a regulated provider in the UK, all fire.com customers can be assured that they can continue to access their payment services - including sterling & euro accounts, integrated banks transfers and debit cards, irrespective of the final outcome from Brexit.
In the last few years, fire.com has focused on the business and corporate market, which has seen its number of customers grow to approx. 3,000. Colm Lyon, CEO & Founder of fire.com said “Since the firm has a significant customer base in the UK, along with our business development offices being in Shoreditch, London, we needed to ensure that we could not just continue to scale, but also continue to be a leading player in the open banking ecosystem in all the regions relevant to us.”
In addition, Lyon added that “Over the last two years we have seen real change in the way businesses wish to pay and get paid. Today it’s all about the integrated experience and allowing businesses to create accounts and issue cards via APIs, to enable businesses to process large volumes of incoming or outgoing payments in an automated and fully integrated fashion. So, our API has become almost more relevant than the payment itself, as it provides real time, instant and fully reconcilable data.” Case studies on the fire.com website, include profiles of Grid Finance - a business finance specialist, Accelerated Payments - an invoice financing business and Buymie - an on-demand grocery delivery platform.
Looking to the future, Lyon doesn’t see Brexit getting in the way, “on the contrary, we are now extremely well positioned to help any business or corporate client that needs to pay and get paid in an integrated way and in a post-Brexit world. And with open banking getting closer and closer we see huge benefits coming down the line and our role is to help businesses execute on these changes.”