A Birmingham FinTech advancing financial inclusion.
Persici Financial Services was founded in 2017 to bring underserved remittance corridors into a properly regulated UK framework — replacing unregulated MSB activity with auditable, supervised flows that customers, partners and regulators can trust.
Bring the financially excluded inside the regulatory perimeter.
Communities in the corridors we serve have, for decades, depended on unregulated money service operators — with no audit trail, no oversight and no recourse. We exist to change that by delivering the same outcome inside a UK-registered framework, supervised by the Financial Conduct Authority and HM Revenue & Customs, and powered by technology we build ourselves.
Regulated remittance, accessible to everyone.
A future in which every family — regardless of corridor or community — can send and receive money through a fully supervised, transparent and technology-led service. Where compliance is a feature, not a barrier, and inclusion is the default.
What we hold ourselves to.
We exist to serve communities historically excluded from formal financial services — bringing them inside the regulatory perimeter, not leaving them to unregulated channels.
Every process, product and platform is designed to meet FCA, HMRC and ICO obligations from day one — never bolted on after the fact.
We build the systems we run on. Fintranet, FintraAccount and Persici Money are designed, built and operated by our own team.
We disclose plainly what we are and what we are not — including our regulatory status, our scope, and the protections that do and do not apply.
Over 6,000 registered customers and £40m–£50m processed. Every transaction is a family supported and a relationship we have to earn each time.
Built without external capital. Every milestone funded by service we delivered — keeping us accountable to customers and partners, not investors.
From a graduate's idea to a regulated platform.
Persici began with a problem its founder, Ashley Robertson, saw first-hand while graduating from the University of Birmingham. Friends and community members were turning to underground money service channels — exposing themselves to fraud, money-laundering risk, and the very real possibility of losing their capital, simply because no properly regulated operator was serving their corridor.
In 2017, Ashley registered Persici Financial Services and applied for registration through the FCA and HMRC. By November 2018, the licences were granted, and the firm opened from a tiny office in Birmingham — funded entirely from the private tuition Ashley was teaching on the side. There was no external capital. Every hire, every milestone, was paid for by the service the company delivered.
By 2020 we had outgrown the original office and signed the lease on a public retail unit on Hagley Road, which opened in September 2020 offering in-person currency exchange and money transfer. Customers, regulators and partners could — and still do — visit a real counter, behind a real door.
Growth surfaced a harder problem: meeting our obligations on data protection, anti-money-laundering, record-keeping, and reporting at scale was impossible with manual processes. We went to the market for software, bought several licences across accounting and customer profiling, and found nothing adequate to the demands of a regulated MSB.
So in February 2021 we founded a sister company, Persici Financial Technologies, and began building the platform ourselves. What we expected to take a small team became a five-year programme involving roughly thirty people across product, design, architecture, backend, frontend, QA and DevOps. Fintranet shipped in 2022, FintraAccount in 2025, and Persici Money in 2026 — together forming the in-house stack that now runs the business.
Today Persici serves more than 6,000 registered customers and has processed in the region of £40m–£50m in transactions — every one of them inside a properly regulated, technology-led framework.
A bootstrapped journey.
- 2017Company founded
Ashley Robertson incorporates Persici Financial Services in Birmingham, funded entirely from earnings as a private tutor.
- 2018FCA & HMRC authorised
Registered as a Small Payment Institution with the FCA (FRN 812820) and as a Money Service Business with HMRC, from a small office in Birmingham.
- 2020Birmingham retail counter opens
September 2020 — public retail unit opens on Hagley Road, offering in-person currency exchange and money transfer.
- 2021Persici Financial Technologies founded
A sister technology company is established to build the regulated-MSP software the market could not provide off-the-shelf.
- 2022Fintranet released
First in-house platform — compliance, operations and customer management — goes live after a 30-strong product, engineering and QA effort.
- 2025FintraAccount released
Customer accounting and financial management platform launches, replacing fragmented third-party tooling.
- 2026Persici Money released
Self-service customer portal launches — completing the in-house stack for regulated remittance and currency exchange.
A real address. A real counter.
Our registered office and operations sit at 197E Hagley Road, Birmingham. The unit also operates a public counter offering in-person GBP, EUR and USD currency exchange for the local community.
Compliance, operations and engineering work side by side from this location. Customers, regulators and partners can — and do — visit.
197E Hagley RoadBirmingham, B16 9RD
United Kingdom
Supervised, registered, accountable.
Persici Financial Services Limited is registered with the Financial Conduct Authority under the Payment Services Regulations 2017 (Firm Reference Number 812820) as a Small Payment Institution for the provision of money remittance services. Registered with HM Revenue & Customs as a Money Service Business for anti-money laundering supervision (XXML00000163487). Company registered in England and Wales (10805038). Information Commissioner's Office registration ZA906128.