Senior Legal Counsel - Financial Services & Regulatory

We are looking for a Senior Financial Services Legal counsel to drive the legal function of our Financial Services activity. This is a greenfield project with high autonomy and responsibility, and the opportunity to shape the legal culture of a fast-growing fintech with a robust preexisting customer base.

Responsibilities

Structure and execute the legal path to ACPR authorization: interpret requirements, translate them into an internal plan, and ensure deliverables are complete, consistent, and aligned across teams; help define the target operating model (intra-group and outsourced) and ensure it is legally defensible and well documented for the application; after licensing, run and scale the legal function of the regulated entity: ensuring ongoing compliance with ACPR expectations, enabling product growth safely, and keeping the operating model continuously audit-ready; own legal oversight of day-to-day legal and corporate matters (policies, governance, reporting support, inspections); lead legal work for launching new regulated products and entering new partnerships; manage legal aspects of onboarding and migrating customers to the licensed subsidiary (terms, communications, complaints/conduct risk); design, document and run legal aspects of corporate governance: delegation of powers, board/committee charters, conflicts management, inter-company arrangements on payment services outsourcing, governance narrative for ACPR reports, and ongoing legal compliance cadence once authorized; own legal design of the FS product perimeter (payments services, account services, credit/financing products as applicable); work with the contractual team on the associated contractual framework: customer terms, disclosures, pricing documentation, complaint handling language, and operational/legal flows including KYC/AML handoffs, incident handling and customer communications; own legal matters relating to critical outsourcing and third-party reliance including contract negotiation, regulatory outsourcing clauses, audit/access rights, sub-outsourcing controls, exit plans, SLAs, data protection allocation, operational resilience expectations, and documentation suitable for ACPR scrutiny; lead the legal plan for migrating customers from Swan; ensure the Financial Services operating model addresses data processing roles, cross-border flows, retention, incident response, recordkeeping, and contractual protections; prepare ACPR interactions; once authorized, own the relationship with ACPR from a legal perspective and train internal stakeholders on legal/regulatory constraints; build a legal-by-design approach for Financial Services

Requirements

8+ years of relevant experience, including in-house legal experience at a regulated entity (payments, EMI/PI, bank, lending/consumer credit, factoring, etc.), fintech, or BaaS; substantial experience in regulated financial services legal work; comfortable owning cross-functional programmes; senior legal expert in a French ACPR-regulated entity (établissement de paiement, établissement de crédit, société de financement or similar); hands-on contract experience and knowledge about our regulatory environment (arrêté du 3 novembre 2014, PSD2, DORA, EBA Guidelines, etc.); credible leadership on ACPR/European regulatory frameworks for payments and/or lending/financing; outsourcing and third-party risk legal frameworks in regulated environments; governance and regulated-entity corporate law basics; ability to work fast without losing rigour; strong pedagogy to explain complex regulatory legal topics to product managers, engineers and founders in simple, actionable terms; pragmatic, impact-driven approach capable of operating under strong regulatory constraints without blocking innovation; very strong written and oral communication skills in both French and English; must speak English; energized by an ever-shifting work environment; highly collaborative; sufficiently experienced to prioritize business-led actions

Benefits

25 vacation days paid by Pennylane; competitive compensation package; company shares; budget to turn home into a more comfortable workspace; monthly allowance to work from a coworking space; access to 8000 fitness spaces in Europe and more than 300 wellness activities through Gymlib; access to Busuu to perfect English or French; latest Apple equipment; possibility to work remotely from country of residence in Europe within a maximum time difference of two hours from CET; company events such as Tech Days and annual seminar; if based in France: French contract following French regulation, 6 to 12 RTT, 5 weeks PTOs, lunch credits (Swile), Alan Blue healthcare cover, regular events in cities where Pennylaners are mostly present