About

iZettle is an innovative financial services platform that is at the forefront of the fast-developing fintech sector, and through its range of services enables small businesses to take payments and optimise their financial management. As iZettle’s first legal counsel, Oskar Arndt was charged with building the company’s in-house legal function from scratch, which he has built up to currently contain five members that support the fledgling business. Arndt describes his method of team building was to build a team to ‘support scale and efficient advice across all departments’, and having the latest regulatory developments in mind, his team includes a privacy counsel having led a GDPR readiness and implementation program. Reflecting on how accomplished his team has become, Arndt cites a particular highlight as assisting with financing rounds and the ‘closing [of a] facility with a US based lending partner – doing so while supporting the general business’, achieved thanks to a combination of hiring outstanding talent and emphasising the legal function should not simply operate as a legal one. Summarising the key challenge of working to mitigate risk in the context of a growing company in a fast-moving environment, Arndt says: ‘Actually working together with resources for product development and technology – agile [as] cultures needed – [so] applying this to have the same rhythm with rest of the business. [We must] find ways of enabling more effective ways of managing time and projects especially as the company grows’. He cites the challenge as being mainly to ‘understand and adapt to regulatory change, working with compliance to do this’. Putting these ideas into practice, Arndt has worked on a number of significant transactions and deals recently, including the closing of EIB funding, and most recently PayPal’s acquisition of iZettle. Arndt began his legal career in 2008 at Bird & Bird in Stockholm, where he practiced for over five years and accrued experience in M&A transactions, which has helped prepare him for his in-house role at iZettle.