The Ankara-London Bridge: Inside the Quiet Regulatory Cooperation That Could Open the UK Market to Turkish Fintechs

On 12 September 2025, buried in the routine regulatory gazette that the Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency publishes every Friday, a two-paragraph notice announced that the BDDK had signed a memorandum of understanding with the United Kingdom's Financial Conduct Authority "concerning the supervision of electronic money and payment service institutions operating across both jurisdictions." The notice was drafted in the bloodless bureaucratic Turkish that regulatory agencies favour when they want something to pass without attention. It worked. The announcement received no coverage in any major Turkish financial publication. Bloomberg's Istanbul bureau did not pick it up. Reuters passed. Even the specialist fintech newsletters that track Turkish regulatory developments in granular detail appear to have missed it. This is a mistake. The BDDK-FCA memorandum, if implemented to its logical extent, could represent the most significant market access development for Turkish financial technology companies in a decade.

The substance of the MoU, reconstructed from the gazette notice and confirmed through conversations with two officials familiar with its development, centres on a framework for "enhanced regulatory cooperation" between the two agencies in the supervision of electronic money institutions. In practice, this means three things. First, the BDDK and FCA will share supervisory information about licensed e-money firms operating or seeking to operate in both Turkey and the UK, including capital adequacy data, compliance reports, and customer complaint records. Second, the FCA will accept BDDK licensing and supervision as evidence of "equivalent regulatory standing" when evaluating UK authorisation applications from Turkish e-money firms. Not an automatic passport, but a significant reduction in the duplicative due diligence that has historically made UK market entry prohibitively expensive for Turkish financial institutions. Third, the two agencies will establish a standing technical working group that meets quarterly to discuss emerging regulatory issues in digital payments, with a particular focus on anti-money-laundering standards, consumer protection frameworks, and cross-border transaction monitoring.

The significance of this arrangement becomes clear when you consider the alternatives. Within the European Union, financial institutions benefit from the passporting regime: a company licensed in any EU member state can offer services across all 27 members without obtaining separate authorisation in each one. When the UK left the EU, it lost this passporting mechanism, and simultaneously began building a network of bilateral regulatory cooperation agreements designed to replicate, in a more targeted fashion, the market access that passporting had provided. The UK has signed such agreements with Singapore, Australia, Switzerland, and Japan. Turkey was not, until now, on that list. The BDDK-FCA memorandum does not create a full passport; Turkish e-money firms will still need to apply for separate FCA authorisation. But it creates something that did not previously exist: a defined, structured pathway through which a Turkish fintech can present its BDDK credentials and receive credit for them in the UK licensing process, rather than starting from zero.

Which Turkish companies stand to benefit? The most obvious candidates are the handful of Turkish electronic money institutions that have built substantial domestic businesses and have been quietly exploring international expansion. Papara, Turkey's largest e-money institution with over 20 million users and a valuation last reported at approximately $1.65 billion, has made no secret of its interest in European and UK markets. Iyzico, now part of PayU, already has some UK-adjacent operations through its parent's European presence but could benefit from a direct Turkish regulatory pathway. Smaller but fast-growing firms like Colendi and Moka could find the UK market, with its 5.6 million Turkish diaspora banking customers and its position as Europe's largest fintech market, suddenly within realistic reach. The MoU also has implications for the reverse flow: UK-licensed fintechs seeking to enter Turkey could benefit from the same framework, potentially accelerating the kind of competitive pressure that Turkey's domestic payments market needs. The timing is not coincidental. The BDDK has spent the past two years significantly tightening its supervision of the domestic e-money sector, revoking licences from firms that failed to meet enhanced capital and compliance requirements. This housecleaning, painful as it was for the firms affected, has had the effect of raising the credibility of the licences that remain. A BDDK e-money licence in 2025 means something more than it did in 2022, and the FCA's willingness to recognise it as evidence of "equivalent regulatory standing" reflects that improvement. In a sense, Turkey's domestic regulatory tightening has created the preconditions for international regulatory recognition, a virtuous cycle that the BDDK's leadership, whatever other criticisms one might make of them, appears to have understood and pursued deliberately. Whether this MoU translates into actual UK market entries by Turkish fintechs within the next twelve to eighteen months, or whether it languishes in the bureaucratic purgatory where many such agreements end up, remains to be seen. But the framework is real, the pathway is defined, and the commercial incentive is substantial. For an industry that has spent years looking inward, the Ankara-London bridge is a window worth looking through.