DAC BEACHCROFT ANNOUNCES PARTNER PROMOTIONS IN DUBLIN
International law firm DAC Beachcroft recently announced the promotion of three colleagues to its partnership in Dublin.
They are David Kennedy (Defendant Injury), Louise O’Reilly (Specialist Insurance) and Brian Ormond (Professional, Public and Regulatory Law).
DAC Beachcroft Dublin is a full service international firm which now has over 75 employees and 13 partners. It has significant expertise in all aspects of insurance, health, commercial litigation, employment, professional, public and regulatory law, corporate, competition, and real estate.
Lisa Broderick, Location Head of DAC Beachcroft’s Dublin office, commented: “I am delighted about the well-deserved promotions of David, Louise and Brian. They are fantastic ambassadors for our firm and its culture and help us continue to do work that makes us, and our clients, feel proud.”
Lisa elaborated that the implementation of the firm’s Flex Forward Policy in Dublin has been very successful and colleagues fully enjoy the firm’s ‘Life That Works’ proposition while delivering bespoke solutions to each of their clients.
problems,” he explains. “When I see a problem I can usually help you solve it. There is nothing magical about what I do – I just like to solve problems.”
What started as the solution to one particular banking problem appears to have resulted in the creation of a whole new alternative way of providing banking and many other financial services online. Did he just sit down day and say, ‘I want to redesign the entire online banking system?’
“That wasn’t how I looked at it. It was more a case of having worked with mobile phones and the cloud and some pretty advanced technology and seeing that banks were behind the curve. So I started approaching the banks and working my way in. Every time I would replace one layer for a bank I realised that the layer underneath it also required attention. I started by coming from a customer experience viewpoint to working my way inside the bank one layer at a time. It is not like I said I was going to reinvent banking.”
Yet, that’s pretty much what Zakka was trying to achieve, and he was not welcomed with open arms. “Some banks did not like the fact that I was a geek coming from the outside, not a banker. They did not like me trying to tell them I could do a better job.” In fact, resistance from European and other western banks was a major factor in Zakka’s decision to target African and Middle Eastern financial institutions to prove his concept and seek launch customers.
The cloud was one of the local stumbling blocks. In order for Layer software to be scalable, it needs to be hosted on the internet and, for security and other reasons, banks were reluctant to deploy online distributed software. “Layer was never something you could scale by installing it in one bank branch at a time,” he remarks. We started in the cloud and were ahead of our time. But we only found one bank to sign up with us early on and that was because they never asked the regulator for permission. Other banks said, ‘no way are we going to put our data in the cloud, you have to do it on the premises’. Now the banks are saying we can use the cloud, so we are back to where we started.”
Zakka says that Layer’s SaaS platform delivers banking services to over 25 million consumers through partnerships with United Bank for Africa, Al Baraka in Bahrain, Al Alizz in Oman, Zenith in Nigeria, and First National Bank in Lebanon. Layer has also partnered with finance platform Railsbank, which aims to enable any business or brand around the world to embed digital finance into their customer journey.
The partnership with Railsbank means that Layer can offer a whitelabel Banking-as-a-service platform to fintech, e-commerce, and brands. The embedded finance sector, where services are offered within nontraditional areas such as in-store shopping, is growing rapidly, especially buy-now-pay-later, a key element of embedded services
Established a decade ago in 2012, Layer Digital Solutions Ltd has been a slow burn for Roy Zakka. Accumulated losses to the end of 2020 amounted to $4.4m, though the company has turned the corner. The 2020 accounts filing shows turnover increasing to $3.6m from $540,000 the previous year, and the net profit was $950,000.
The December 2020 balance sheet showed $4.4m capital invested and net current assets of just $6,000, but the filing also notes that in 2021 $3.5m of additional funding was secured. In addition, in February 2021 $510,000 of loans, with an 8% annual interest coupon, were converted to equity, while $2.3m of funding has been raised in 2022, according to the company.
Having proved the concept in Africa and the Middle East, Zakka insists that acceptance of Layer is growing among European institutions. Sober high-street banks are leveraging their licences to launch funky online banking and credit options which appeal to younger market segments. A product like Layer enables them to go to market fast.
Ultimately Zakka says he wants to take Layer public. “Although if some big company comes and says ‘we love what you’re doing, here’s a big cheque’, well then, why not? But the idea right now is we want to scale it, we want to make it big, we want to be the next Irish unicorn. So watch that space. Okay?”
‘There is nothing magical about what I do - I just like to solve problems’