The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) granted the licence after extensive due diligence into Payhawk's compliance, financial, and operational processes. The new UK EMI licence will allow Payhawk to directly issue electronic money, facilitate digital payments and provide card issuance and payment solutions to new and existing UK customers.

In addition to the EMI licence in the UK, Payhawk holds an EMI license covering the EEA, is a principal member of Visa Europe, is accredited by ICAEW's Technology Accreditation program, and maintains PCI DSS Level 1, SOC 2, and ISO 27001 certifications.

Hristo Borisov, CEO and Co-founder of Payhawk says, "We are thrilled to achieve another important milestone in our journey to make managing business payments easy - for everyone. Our company's strong product DNA allows us to quickly launch new, high-quality features for our customers, and the new UK licence unlocks new possibilities for us. By controlling more of the payment process stack for our customers, we can optimise the infrastructure to address the needs of our client base - further accelerating development velocity and innovation. This is a major step in our ambition to become the preferred global spend management company by combining our cutting-edge software with regulated payment services.”

In the past few months, Payhawk has added several executives to the leadership team who come with strong track records leading regulated financial institutions.

Borisov continues, “We are happy to welcome Gareth Walsh, a former executive at SumUp, who joined as Group Chief Compliance Officer; Maor Fishman who joined our group as a General Counsel from Checkout.com, where he served the role of a Deputy General Counsel; and Pedro Batista who is in charge of our regulated activities in the UK as Chief Executive Officer of Payhawk Financial Services UK, and is also responsible for Payhawk’s global Payment & Operations division.”

Pedro Batista, now Chief Executive Officer of Payhawk Financial Services UK, says: “We are extremely proud of receiving our e-money licence in the United Kingdom and receiving the trust of the FCA, which, in our view, has one of the highest benchmarks of regulators worldwide and traditionally sets the tone of financial regulation globally. This confirms our commitment to providing regulated financial services of the highest standard.”