Katherine Kennedy

Fractional Counsel – FinTech & Payments

“Incredibly easy to deal with and straight-forward in negotiations, taking a pragmatic approach to legal points that some lawyers unnecessarily turn into snagging points. Positive, finds sensible compromises and solutions to avoid black letter law derailing commercial intentions, and clearly understands the market inside out.”

Ed HayesData, Privacy & Cybersecurity Partner, TLT LLP

About Katherine

Katherine is a commercial and payments lawyer. She has significant experience representing institutional payment service providers and technology businesses with a particular interest in FinTechs and DLT.

Katherine’s Expertise

Katherine has significant experience advising technology businesses in the fintech and payments industry.

Her legal expertise includes negotiating commercial agreements, data protection issues, intellectual property matters and financial services regulation.

Katherine’s Career history

Katherine started her legal career training and practising in the Intellectual Property department at Slaughter & May.

Katherine went on to work in-house at an investment bank and then spent 8 years working with VocaLink (now part of the MasterCard group), leading on major financial services infrastructure contracts. She went on to work with blockchain provider SETL, where she advised the Board in addition to her legal duties, which included overseeing investments, JVs and M&A as well as commercial contracts and advising on applications of distributed ledger technology.

More recently Katherine led the legal team at payments provider Pay.com and during this time she was appointed to the Board of Coinify.

Katherine also served as the Data Protection Officer for the Open Banking Implementation Entity at its initiation, as well as for a number of other Open Banking and payments firms.

Katherine’s Education

BA (Hons) Jurisprudence at Oxford (1999)

College of Law (Chester) (2000)

Katherine’s Admissions

Solicitor of the Supreme Court of England & Wales, admitted September 2003.

Authorised and regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority with SRA number 292492.

“Incredibly easy to deal with and straight-forward in negotiations, taking a pragmatic approach to legal points that some lawyers unnecessarily turn into snagging points. Positive, finds sensible compromises and solutions to avoid black letter law derailing commercial intentions, and clearly understands the market inside out.”

Ed HarrisIn house lawyer, Citibank

Katherine is so passionate and spirited in her work always coming up with solutions and negotiating positions when required. She always works with and seeks information from the team to help with her understanding and her interpretation of the contract. She is never afraid to challenge or question the status quo and always has the company’s best interest in any situation.

Steve WrightProduct lead, VocaLink

Katherine has demonstrated an amazing work ethic; an ability to carefully negotiate through some difficult conversations by clearly articulating her point of view; a quite frankly amazing ability to turn round deliverables to very challenging tight time frames, whilst always maintaining a positive attitude and great (dry) sense of humour.

Finally, it is also fair to say that although a number of people worked on the Bacs Contract Renewal, Katherine was absolutely at the top of list of people who deserve special acknowledgment for the work they did in bringing these difficult negotiations to close.

David McPheeChief Policy and Engagement Officer and Executive Member at Pay.UK

We found you extremely pleasant to deal with – you were professional, courteous, calm, proactive and sensible in your approach (and jolly nice too!)

Martin CookPartner, Burges Salmon LLP

Katherine combines a highly forensic approach to problems with an easy and popular style. She is unfailingly efficient, very hard-working, properly discreet and fits in very well with both the executive team and the external directors. Her counsel both at a corporate level and at an industry level is well articulated, sound and has a welcome commercial edge to it.

Peter RandallIndependent Non Executive Director

I had the pleasure to work with Katherine as our external lawyer on various contracts in the Financial Technology Industry. She has a very good understanding of the industry and her contract examinations and assessments were always extremely useful for us. I appreciated also her reliability and responsiveness.

Anja RoxinSenior Legal Counsel, bei msg systems ag

I had the pleasure of working with Katherine at Pay.com for 18 months where together we achieved so much. Her professionalism and her diligence helped us close acquisitions and create legal frameworks across all of our customer interactions, and created a level of automation without which our business could not function – I’m extremely grateful to Katherine for all of her hard work and look forward to continuing our prosperous relationship.

Nick BanerjeeCRO, Pay.com