Partner Profile

Dr Irena Dajkovic, the Founding and Managing Partner of DALIR Law Firm, is a lawyer with a combination of about twenty years of private practice and in-house experience in commercial, corporate and regulatory laws.

Over the years, her clients ranged from financial institutions, private equity firms, retail companies to private individuals. She focuses on clients’ goals and has often been praised by them for her excellent technical skills, strategic advice and high ethical standards. She has helped numerous clients to expand globally and optimise their intra-group operations.

Dr Dajkovic has been advising fintech clients, including existing Payment Service Providers and online platforms, on the recent EU Payment Services Directive 2, its implementing national legislations, and their impact for their business (e.g. standard terms & conditions, operations, existing processes, licencing requirements etc.). Before founding DALIR, Dr Dajkovic was the General Counsel and the Head of Compliance of Checkout.com, an international merchant acquirer and a principal member of the leading card schemes such as Visa, MasterCard, Amex, JCB. She helped them obtain and/or maintain the card schemes and regulatory licences, negotiated major deals with international merchants and banks, and over the time built a strong legal team. In this role, she was also in the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)’s controlling function as the PSD individual and the main legal contact for all regulatory relationships (i.e. FCA, National Crime Agency, Information Commissioner’s Office etc.).

Prior to joining Checkout.com Dr Dajkovic worked with an international legal consultancy, Axiom, for clients such as WorldPay and PayPal. While advising WorldPay, and as their representative, Dr Dajkovic was one of the initiators of the European Payments Institutions Federation (EPIF), a trade association created at the time to promote the interests of the newly created EEA payment institutions.

Dr Dajkovic’s experience in private practice was predominantly with Clifford Chance, a large international law firm, where she spent a number of years working in the competition & financial regulatory teams. During that time, she advised, among others, on the EU Payment Service Directive 1, its national transpositions and interpretations, and related licensing issues. She was also seconded to the European Payments Council (EPC), where she was in charge of drafting and advising on SEPA Rulebooks, leading the EPC Legal Support Group and advising various other EPC working groups, in addition to dealing with day-to-day payments related commercial issues.