• European HQ established in Dublin due to its position as a global centre for financial services innovation, thriving technology scene and access to skilled talent.

• HQ led by former WhatsApp and Facebook Executive, Joe Morley, TrueLayer’s Vice President and General Manager for Europe and new Chief Operating Officer for Europe, Leigh-Anne Cotter.

TrueLayer, Europe’s leading open banking platform, has announced it has been authorised by the Central Bank of Ireland (CBI) as a Payments Institution and established its new European headquarters in Dublin to support its rapidly growing client base across the continent.

The expansion marks another significant milestone for TrueLayer on its mission to open up finance, building an open banking network that brings together payments, financial data and identity to redefine how people spend, save, and transact online. Its API-first platform offers more than 90% coverage of all major European markets, and accounts for more than half of all open banking traffic in the UK, Ireland and Spain, processing billions of euros in payments.

TrueLayer’s choice of Ireland for its European HQ has been in part motivated by Dublin establishing itself as a European financial services centre and strategic hub for innovation, home to around 450 financial services companies, creating a sophisticated fintech and payments ecosystem. Additionally, the CBI has a strong track record as a regulator committed to delivering quality financial authorisation and supervision. 

The European HQ is led by Joe Morley in the role of General Manager for Europe, having joined the firm earlier this year to manage the authorisation process. The former WhatsApp and Facebook executive brings extensive payments, technical and commercial knowledge, having launched and managed the business APIs for the monetisation of both platforms in EMEA. Joe is leading the European management team from Dublin for all supporting functions, in addition to the in-market country managers that the company is actively hiring for.

Joining TrueLayer as its Chief Operating Officer for Europe is Leigh-Anne Cotter, who was previously head of Commerce and Payments Operations at WhatsApp. Leigh-Anne brings significant payments experience having also been part of the leadership team at one of Ireland’s most successful international companies, Realex Payments.

“Ireland has become the EU’s fintech centre of choice with the likes of Coinbase, Stripe, Remitly, Square and our clients, including Paysafe and Payoneer being based here. We are excited to be joining them, making Dublin our home from which to accelerate our European expansion and deliver our market-leading open banking services to banks, fintech firms and ecommerce platforms across the continent,” commented Joe Morley, CEO for TrueLayer Ireland and GM Europe. “The Irish domestic market is also evolving rapidly with our clients such as Revolut having rapidly established an impressive user base, supporting consumers and businesses with open banking-based services that improve their everyday lives. The future is incredibly exciting with open banking payments replacing cards as the primary payment method at the checkout for ecommerce firms of every shape and size.”

TrueLayer has expanded its services across 12 European markets, growing payment volumes by 600x, and adding hundreds of new customers across banks, fintech firms, ecommerce, trading, wealth management and iGaming. 

Francesco Simoneachi, CEO and co-founder of TrueLayer commented: “When we began our search for a European HQ, we wanted a location that mirrored much of what made the UK such an exceptional base for us -  a strong regulator, in an established global financial services centre that embraces fintech and digital innovation. Ireland was ideal, with the CBI’s regulatory regime broadly similar to the UK, and Dublin being a thriving centre for payments and ecommerce. The city has built an incredible reputation for financial services and offers the talent across engineering, product and payments that we will need to support our ambitious growth plans. We’re only the second firm to be authorised by CBI in 2021, so I’m incredibly proud of the team that worked on the application to make our European HQ a reality.”

This expansion is TrueLayer’s latest milestone in 2021, with the company expanding globally, establishing operations in APAC with an office in Australia and launching innovative services such as PayDirect. Today, more than 10,000 developers are actively building services and applications on the TrueLayer platform.