Overview

Corvane Ryle advises the companies, investors and financial institutions that are reshaping payments, lending, wealth, insurance and digital assets. Our clients range from early-stage platforms to public payments groups such as Quillon Payments, and from venture investors to the established banks that partner with them. We act from San Francisco, New York, London, Singapore and Frankfurt.

Fintech businesses sit at the intersection of technology and regulation, and the line between them is moving. Payment licensing, e-money and safeguarding rules, open banking frameworks, the EU Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, anti-money laundering duties and consumer lending rules all apply differently depending on the product and the market. Sponsor bank arrangements are under closer supervisory scrutiny, and regulators in the US, the UK and the EU are testing how artificial intelligence is used for credit decisions, fraud detection and customer support. Data is both the asset and the exposure, so privacy, security and incident readiness are part of every financing and partnership.

Our teams combine venture and growth financing, capital markets, M&A, technology transactions, banking, privacy and cyber, consumer protection and litigation lawyers. We advise on a financing in the morning and a regulatory notification in the afternoon. Kenji Watanabe-Price in San Francisco leads on technology transactions for platform businesses, and Mei-Lin Sorensen in Singapore advises on capital markets and financing transactions for Asian fintech issuers.

Our approach is practical. We help founders and investors weigh regulatory cost against speed to market, we negotiate partner and bank agreements that can scale, and we prepare companies for the diligence that follows a financing or an exit. Many of our fintech clients stay with us from their first license application through an acquisition or public offering.

Representative experience

• Advised Quillon Payments on its Series D financing.
• Represented a lending platform in a forward-flow arrangement with an institutional credit investor.
• Advised a European payments company on authorization and safeguarding arrangements for a UK launch.
• Counseled a digital bank on a sponsor bank program and the supervisory expectations that attach to it.
• Acted for a buy-now-pay-later provider on consumer disclosures in the US and UK.
• Advised a wealth technology company on its acquisition by a global asset manager.
• Represented a crypto-asset service provider on authorization under the EU Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation.
• Counseled a payments processor on an incident response and regulator notifications following a security event.
• Defended a fintech lender in a putative class action concerning loan disclosures.