How fire.com is helping businesses with the uncertainty of Brexit.

Time is moving on. With the deadline for the UK to leave the European Union now just 12 months away businesses need to start preparing for the possibility of a deal that falls short of preserving the status quo in trading relationships. Earlier this week, it was announced that the UK and the EU have reached a draft agreement on the terms of a transition deal, which should serve to ease business fears over a post-Brexit cliff edge.

Businesses will want to continue trading – paying and being paid for goods and services between the EU and the UK. While a transitional arrangement would give everyone time to negotiate a new trade deal, financial services may not be part of that new arrangement. So financial and payment services firms that have relied on pass-porting their licences (i.e. getting a licence in one EU country and using this to trade in other EU countries) will need to have UK and EU licences should they wish to continue trading in both regions. Will this result in businesses trading across the UK and Eurozone finding it harder to access accounts and payment services in both EUR and GBP?

Another obvious challenge for businesses is the potential fluctuations in currencies at this time of uncertainty. This can have a significant impact on businesses and many will consider holding currency in both EUR and GBP based on their upcoming cash requirements.

At fire.com, we aim to help businesses better manage their payments. When a business opens a fire.com account, it immediately gets access to a sterling and euro account with the option to add subsequent accounts in real time, enabling businesses to get paid, hold funds and pay out in both currencies. Funds can be transferred between the accounts in real time, 24×7.

In addition businesses can order any number of debit cards and link these to their different accounts, use the firework mobile app for real time notification and alerts, export data to various accounting packages and integrate their systems to their fire.com accounts.

We have thousands of businesses across the UK and Ireland who are now using fire.com to better manage their payments, while trading in sterling and euro.

You can open a fire.com business account online in as little as 48 hours. As always, we’d love to hear your feedback.

Colm Lyon, CEO fire.com