We’re trusted by over 1000 businesses in the UK and EU
As a Fire customer, it’s important to us that you should fully understand how your money is protected in your Fire account.
Fire-EU is a Payment Institution (“PI”), regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland and Fire-UK is an Electronic Money Institution (“EMI”) regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (“FCA”).
As a PI and EMI, Fire protects your money through “safeguarding” and this is different to how your money is protected by Credit Institutions (banks) in the UK and Ireland. We believe it is important for customers to understand this difference, so we explain safeguarding below.
How is your money protected at Fire?
Safeguarding is the way in which we protect your money by placing it in a designated safeguarding account with a regulated financial institution. This account holds only Fire customers’ funds and Fire ensures this money is never used for operational or lending purposes. In the unlikely event that Fire ceases trading, the safeguarding account is protected from other creditors making a claim against Fire. In this scenario, you would get the majority of your money back, except for costs deducted by the insolvency practitioner for distributing the money to you, which will only be deducted from customer balances if there are no funds available from Fire itself.
In what way is safeguarding different from the protection given by Credit Institutions (or banks)?
Credit Institutions (banks) protect your money using an independent organisation called the Deposit Guarantee Scheme (“DGS”) in Ireland and the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (“FSCS”) in the UK which protect customer money up to a limited amount. If a DGS/FSCS protected firm ceases trading, the DGS/FSCS will pay back eligible customers up to a maximum compensation amount. This happens regardless of whether the DGS/FSCS protected firm actually has that money.
If Fire ceases trading, our customers’ claims will be paid from the safeguarding account. As Fire cannot use this protected money, there will be enough in the safeguarding account to cover all customer balances (subject to insolvency practitioner costs mentioned above). The payout may take longer than it would with the DGS/FSCS.
How can you learn more?
You can read more within our terms and conditions (Section 4.5 for Personal Customers and Section 4.4 for Business Customers) or on the FCA’s website – https://www.fca.org.uk/consumers/using-payment-service-providers
We would also like to take this opportunity to thank you for choosing Fire. Should you have any questions, please contact us through our email – support@fire.com