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Ireland is a significant post-Brexit EU payments/fintech hub with a deep base of CBI-authorised EMIs/PIs. The market mixes traditional incumbent banks (Bank of Ireland, AIB) with global infrastructure players headquartered or hubbed in Dublin (Stripe, Wise, Circle, Square) and homegrown firms (Fenergo, TransferMate, Wayflyer, Fire Financial Services, Humm). The Banking & Payments Federation Ireland (BPFI), with affiliates FIBI and FPAI, represents 120+ institutions. The National Payments Strategy (launched October 2024) is steering market development, including new CBI orderly-wind-down/liquidation powers for payment firms.
The market is being actively steered by policy. The National Payments Strategy launched on 15 October 2024, addressing cash, payment resilience, fraud and the future of payments; the Department of Finance was to provide the CBI with orderly-wind-down and liquidation powers for payment firms, with recommendations by end-June 2025. The CBI is also increasing scrutiny of point-of-sale BNPL lending and is expected to bring BNPL under formal credit rules. The new liquidation powers change firm-exit dynamics, and the looming BNPL formalisation signals tighter treatment of embedded-credit models. The structural M&A and investment events themselves are carried in W13; this module covers the market-structure frame within which they occur.
Outlook
The industry-structure trajectory is stable in its concentration of EU infrastructure in Dublin but active at the policy layer. The National Payments Strategy will continue to steer market development, the new CBI liquidation powers reshape how distressed payment firms exit, and BNPL formalisation under formal credit rules looms as a discrete tightening. The hub's competitive depth — incumbents alongside global infrastructure and homegrown firms — is a durable structural feature.
Industry Structure & Commercial Dynamics
Ireland's PI/EMI sector is both the Central Bank of Ireland's fastest-growing supervised segment and a well-established destination for firms relocating from the UK following Brexit. The Central Bank has licensed dozens of EMIs and PIs since the second Payment Services Directive came into force, with a steady stream of that authorisation activity attributable to firms seeking to preserve EEA market access from an EU base after the UK's departure from the bloc. This post-Brexit relocation dynamic sits alongside, and partly explains, the sector's headline growth from 14 to 51 authorised firms between 2016 and 2023.
The structural picture this creates is a sector whose scale has grown for reasons that are only partly organic domestic expansion — a meaningful share reflects firms establishing or relocating an EU regulatory base in Ireland specifically, rather than purely Irish market demand for payment services. This distinction matters for reading the sector's commercial dynamics: growth driven by relocation activity has different competitive and concentration implications than growth driven by expanding domestic transaction volume, and the safeguarded-funds growth to EUR7,820 million by 2023 should be read with that composition in mind.
Outlook
Watch for whether the post-Brexit relocation flow into Ireland's PI/EMI sector continues at a steady pace or begins to plateau as the initial post-Brexit relocation wave completes; a plateauing relocation flow would shift the sector's growth story toward organic domestic and cross-border transaction growth rather than regulatory-base relocation.
Sources and findings (4)
- T2https://bpfi.ie/bpfi-opening-statement-to-oireachtas-finance-committee-3rd-december-2025/retrieved
- T2https://bpfi.ie/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Irish-Fintech-Survey.pdfretrieved
- T3https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/10/06/3161612/28124/en/Ireland-Embedded-Finance-Market-Databook-2025-Tracks-100-KPIs-Across-Embedded-Payments-Lending-Insurance-Banking-and-Wealth-in-Ireland.htmlretrieved
- T3https://www.williamfry.com/knowledge/national-payments-strategy-launched-by-the-minister-for-finance/retrieved