Martin Cook Partner

Martin is a technology and financial services lawyer, and is internationally recognised for his fintech and technology expertise. He leads the firm’s Financial Services Sector Group.

Prior to Burges Salmon, Martin was General Counsel at WorldRemit (now Zepz), a leading international payments business, responsible for the legal, regulatory, data privacy, company secretarial and risk management functions. Previous in-house roles focussed on technology and fintech, including at Funding Circle as Global Head of Legal & Regulatory. Martin also worked at leading law firms where he advised significant financial institutions and corporates, and technology and private equity firms.

The myriad of issues arising in running a business aside, Martin has led large technology transactions, significant business transformation programmes and major regulatory change projects, obtained regulatory licences and advised on international expansion, product development and risk management. He has developed practical experience of governmental and regulatory engagement, including advocating for quality regulation to benefit both industry and consumers.

Martin is often invited to participate in industry and innovation activities. The UK Government appointed Martin as a founding member of the FinTech Delivery Panel, a body established to enhance the UK’s position as a global leader in the future of financial services. More recently, this has also included membership of the UK Financial Markets Law Committee (FMLC) working group on Fintech and the South West steering group for the Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology (CFIT).

Martin regularly speaks at external events and gets involved in other activities including our Spotlight on Fintech video series where Martin and the Fintech team share insights on how they work and support their Fintech clients in all areas from people issues to brand protection, regulatory compliance to incentives, governance to investment.

Martin is recommended as a Global Leader in Fintech by Who’s Who Legal, the independent and comprehensively researched list of market leading lawyers globally. He is also ranked as “Band 1” for Fintech in Chambers & Partners’ independent legal directory. Martin is listed in Citywealth's 'Tech Top Ten', a list of the leading lawyers for technology entrepreneurs in the UK, USA and Switzerland.

Clients have commented that Martin “is very amenable and easy to work with”, “has a calm, analytical approach"  and “is very clear and pragmatic …  [making] it easy to understand what is a real risk and how to assess or mitigate it, which is a huge value add".

• Advised multiple overseas businesses establish and launch in the UK.
• Advised significant UK businesses with their international expansion programme.
• Advised significant domestic and international banking and insurance groups on business transformation, digitisation and outsourcing.
• Advised digital-first start-ups and scale-ups on growth opportunities (including M&A), their product proposition and business operations.
• Advised a number of clients on the implementation of regulatory change projects driven by market opportunity or regulatory change.
• Advised on multiple successful applications for regulatory authorisation in the UK and internationally.
• Advised on product development and project execution through to successful product launch.
• Leading projects on the development of regulatory policy and strategy, including educating governmental and regulatory stakeholders in the UK, EU, Africa, USA and South America.
• Significant experience of the full range of commercial and technology legal work, particularly platform solutions, proprietary software engineering, cloud solutions, outsourced technology and business process solutions, strategically important commercial agreements and intellectual property exploitation.
• Advised in the context of business critical situations, including external investment (funding rounds and IPO) and during periods of business retrenchment (including divestments, organisational restructures and in the context of crisis and reputation management situations).
• Advised on the establishment and implementation of risk management and assurance functions for regulated businesses, as well as on governance and consumer duty projects.