Electronic money institution applicants

To become an AEMI, you must:

• hold adequate initial capital
• have robust governance arrangements, internal controls and risk management procedures
• ensure that anyone with a qualifying holding is fit and proper
• have directors and persons responsible for managing your e-money and payment services who are of good repute, with appropriate knowledge and experience to issue e-money and provide payment services
• take adequate measures to safeguard e-money holders' funds, and payment service users' funds (if applicable)
• comply with the money laundering regulations (MLRs)
• not prevent our effective supervision of your business if you have close links to another person (if the links are outside the UK, foreign laws mustn’t prevent our effective supervision of the business)

To become an SEMI, you must not:

• generate an average outstanding e-money of more than €5m, and (if applicable) your monthly average payment transactions in a 12-month period must not exceed €3m
  • if you've been providing services for less than 12 months, or if you haven't started yet, your projected average of outstanding e-money mustn't exceed €5m
• provide account information services (AIS) or payment initiation services (PIS)
• have managers that have been convicted of money laundering, terrorist financing or other financial crimes
• prevent our effective supervision of your business if you have close links to another person (if the links are outside the UK, foreign laws mustn’t prevent our effective supervision of the business)

And you must:

• hold adequate initial capital
• ensure that anyone with a qualifying holding is fit and proper
• have directors and persons responsible for managing your e-money and payment services who are of good repute, with appropriate knowledge and experience to issue e-money and provide payment services
• take adequate measures to safeguard e-money holders' funds, and payment service users' funds (if applicable)
• comply with the money laundering regulations (MLRs)

Please provide or explain the details of:

Please provide or explain the details of:

• the e-money services (and, if applicable, payment services) business you want to provide, such as your programme of operations and business plan – including your financial information
  • if you intend to provide unrelated payment services, please submit a separate business plan for this
• the people responsible for your e-money services (and, if applicable, payment services) – you'll need to register each individual
• anyone with a qualifying holding in your firm
• information about the control mechanisms to meet your obligations under the MLRs
• the initial capital at the level required by the regulations to start your business and calculation of ongoing capital requirement
• your measures to safeguard funds that have been received in exchange for e-money users' funds (and, if applicable, payment services users’ funds)
• your governance arrangements and risk management procedures (eg the structures you have in place to run a business effectively); we also expect you to include your wind-down plan 
• your procedures for:
  • incident reporting
  • managing sensitive payment data
  • principles and definitions used when collecting statistical data
• your security policy and security-related customer complaints policy
• your outsourcing arrangements (if applicable)
• how you intend to use agents and branches, including the off-site and on-site checks that you'll perform on them (if applicable)

Download and complete an individuals form for EMIs, then submit it as part of your application on Connect.

When completing the form, refer to the notes and factsheet.

Along with the form, you'll need to provide:

• an up-to-date CV of the person
• evidence of a suitability assessment (if you carried out one)

We expect you to assess the fitness and propriety of the directors and persons responsible for the management of your agents.

You're responsible for anything done or omitted by your agents, so you need appropriate systems and controls to oversee them effectively.

You must also tell us if:

• their details change, or
• you cease dealing with an agent