UK “gone down a few places” as employment base following Budget, says European payments boss

The UK has “gone down a few places” as a destination for a top European fintech to employ staff following the UK Budget, according to the CEO of European payment fintech Mollie.

Koen Koppen, CEO of Mollie, which employs around 750 people including a small team in the UK, said:

“The UK was already not on the top list of attractive countries for me to employ people and it has even gone down a few places now.”

The Budget saw Chancellor Rachel Reeves decide firms will bear the brunt of a £40bn total tax rise by increasing the National Insurance rate as well as reducing the threshold that employers start paying, along with a rise in capital gains tax.

Koppen said:

“When the cost of labour rises significantly on the back of tax increases, that might or might not trigger a point in time that we say at these rates this is no longer advantageous to Mollie to employ a central resource in a given country.

“We have a very small central resource pool in London, so it will not make a very significant difference. But it definitely doesn’t make it more attractive for us to move jobs to London or to the UK for that matter.”

Koppen said the UK was already not on the top of Mollie's list to employ staff, due to the “administrative burden” of Visa requirements for non-EU staff entering the UK, following Brexit. Meanwhile, Mollie, which competes against the likes of Checkout.com and Stripe, and has a presence in the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, France, Belgium and the UK, has just launched in Italy.

Its next markets are likely to be Spain, Poland and the Nordics, said the CEO, as it looks to increase its footprint across Europe. Mollie last undertook a funding round, $800m, in 2021, valuing it at around $6.5bn. Koppen said the business was now “well capitalised” and that it had broken even in March this year and been profitable since.

Like many fintechs, Koppen says Mollie is leveraging "significant amounts" of Generative AI, in areas such as customer support, onboarding background checks and in engineering, using models including Open AI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

IMAGE: PIXABAY