Plumber of payments keeps the money flowing at Elavon

Times

12-07-2025

Declan Lynch operates far from the hype of the fintech world. The chief executive of US Bank Europe, the American institution behind the ubiquitous Elavon brand, has been instrumental in building one of the largest payment-processing businesses in Europe from its Irish base over a period of nearly two decades.
Elavon processes hundreds of billions of euros annually through its card payment terminals and ecommerce gateways, providing much of the essential financial plumbing for the retail, hospitality, airline, education and government services sectors. Customers range from corporations as big as Ryanair to local businesses as small as the fashion retailer McMullans of Arklow in Co Wicklow.
This year marks US Bank's 25th in Ireland; Lynch has been in charge since 2006. In that time he has grown the business into a quiet but significant foreign direct investment success, overseeing several transformative acquisitions and expanding to employ more than 1,100 people across several locations in the country.
In an industry increasingly dominated by flashy start-ups and aggressive marketing, Lynch is an outlier. His 19-year tenure at the helm of Elavon is a rarity in modern banking. While many fintechs proclaim their disruptive power, he prefers to operate quietly, more like a highly competent craftsman than a revolutionary.
'I wouldn't like to say it too loudly, but I think I'm the longest-serving bank CEO in Ireland,' he says, attributing his longevity to credibility and reliability — never a bad look in financial services — and comparing it to a much less glamorous business.
'Plumbing is not the most attractive profession or industry. A lot of it comes down to making sure that the pipes are flowing, that the service is available, that there's somebody at the end of the phone if you have a problem. That sort of track record and trust factor are critical.'
So, not the flash, but the flow.
Payments is a busy corner of the financial world right now, nonetheless. Last month AIB sold its half of AIB Merchant Services to its joint venture partner, Fiserv. In April Barclays closed a strategic partnership deal with Brookfield Asset Management that could result in the Canadian private equity firm eventually taking a 70 per cent stake in the bank's payment acceptance business. Around the same time, Global Payments bought Worldpay for $24.25 billion, making it one of the largest payment processors in the world.
It isa crowded space, with the likes of SumUp, Square and Adyen all making inroads in Ireland in recent years after the pandemic cemented cards as the preferred payment method for most retail customers.
'It's a mixture of pure-play fintechs and more established players like ourselves,' Lynch says. 'We like to think of ourselves as having the agility of a fintech with the stability of a bank. There still is a good opportunity for somebody like Elavon to grow. There's still a tonne of cash to be displaced in Europe.'
Lynch's career journey has always followed cash, in one way or another.
After leaving the family farm in Cavan, he got his B Comm at University College Dublin before getting a postgraduate qualification in accounting and joining Deloitte in the late 1980s, a period he remembers as 'a pretty dire time in Ireland economically'.
He says: 'A lot of people got pulled off audit to work on the receivership deals at the time. It was a case of showing up in some industrial estate out in Blanchardstown on a Monday morning with a bunch of security guys to lock the gates before the workers arrived. It was grim to be in the middle of it. But you really got to understand very, very quickly that cashflow is the lifeblood of any business. And when the cashflow dries up, the game's over.'
Lynch got out of Deloitte after three years and headed for the newly established International Financial Services Centre, joining the treasury operations of a Canadian packaging company that had a group of subsidiaries across the European Union.
It was a real frontier operation, set up in the days when the IFSC was more a concept than a location.
'We weren't even located in the IFSC because there was nothing there in 1989,' he says. 'So we were in the leafy environs of Dublin Industrial Estate, which is in Finglas, above one of the packaging plants.'
His career took on a bit more glamour with a role on a mergers and acquisitions team at GE Capital, which was buying up a lot of vendor leasing companies in the 1990s.
'It was a case of make sure you've got five shirts ironed and be at the airport at eight o'clock on a Sunday night — you're going to Sweden,' he recalls.
After a stint at Novell, the software company, Lynch set up his own treasury outsourcing services business, helping tech companies during the dotcom era manage their cashflows and payments during a period of frantic expansion. He sold the business to the New Jersey conglomerate JM Huber in 2004 when he realised it needed a bigger balance sheet to scale.
'Part of the deal was that I stay on for a year and then my plan was to take a year off and just travel and just take a breath,' he says. 'I got sort of three quarters of the way through that year and I got a call.'
US Bank was looking to get a banking licence in Ireland. The company already had an Irish operation — a joint venture with Bank of Ireland — that it had set up in Arklow, Co Wicklow, in 2000 and then went through 'a period of pretty intense M&A'.
Lynch joined in 2006 to integrate and consolidate the 'hodge podge' of businesses that US Bank had acquired over the previous few years and pull it together as a single legal entity with a more defined set of capabilities and a coherent service offering. That is how Elavon was born.
Card payment technology and services were still evolving, and Elavon was a pure-play brand, operating across Europe from its Irish base, doing end-to-end processing for hundreds of thousands of merchants.
Then Lynch's M&A experience came to the fore through a series of transformative acquisitions, beginning in 2010. US Bank was slightly unusual at the time for choosing Ireland rather than London as its European banking platform, but Lynch calls it a 'talent-led decision'. With the financial crisis in full swing, he set about hoovering up a lot of banking talent in Ireland that was, to say the least, underutilised after the 2008 financial crash.
'We hired a lot of good people from the Irish banks, PTSB in particular. People were a little bit frustrated maybe in terms of their career opportunities post-crisis.'
Target No 1 was Bank of America's corporate trust business, based in Carrick-on-Shannon. The US retail banking company was suffering successive ratings downgrades and was forced by regulators to unload certain ratings-sensitive businesses.
Next came Quintillion, an Irish fund services provider that had hit a growth wall and was looking for a bank partner to support its growth ambitions.
Those two deals expanded US Bank's European horizons beyond payments, but what Lynch calls the bank's most significant acquisition doubled down on its payments pedigree.
In late 2019 US Bank bought Sage Pay, an ecommerce platform, for €250 million.
'Right before the pandemic, we closed the deal on the day before the announcement to go home for a week,' Lynch says. 'In some ways, the pandemic was good to us. On the one hand, 50 per cent of our customers shut down overnight. But I think where the positive part of the pandemic was, it sort of really accelerated that displacement of cash for card.'
Elavon and US Bank were kind of a safe haven for customers through that time, providing reliability and stability while many businesses had to suddenly reimagine their business models for a locked- down economy.
'US Bank is a 150-year-old Midwest [America] conservative organisation,' Lynch says. 'If you think of all the cycles financial services go through, we tend to miss the highs but we also tend to miss the lows. It's a very, very stable organisation.
'We're not a name that is top of mind, but you're going to see Elavon almost every time you tap your card.'
The sense of stability could come in handy through the current uncertainty surrounding global trade and the US-Ireland business relationship, something Lynch says he is watching very closely.
'The Irish-US relationship from a business perspective, I never underplay it,' he says. 'It's been a key part of supporting us and helping us through our journey.'
Notwithstanding the volatility around trade and possible impacts on global growth, the payments business is not standing still and Lynch is looking at both organic growth opportunities and partnerships, increasingly with the software world, where payments are increasingly embedded in larger merchant services packages.
'I think there is still a lot of opportunity for a player like us,' he says. 'If you look at the total transaction market in Ireland and Europe, it's 50 per cent cash, 50 per cent card.'
What customers want now, he says, as non-cash payments continue to grow, is the kind of stability that a big bank operator can provide.
'We operate at 99.99 per cent,' he says. 'Uptime is critical. This is 24/7, 365 days a year. Payment space is evolving very quickly and to keep up requires investment. These are not small-dollar investments; it's infrastructure-heavy, tech-heavy investment. It doesn't come cheaply. Without throwing shade on others, that is a big differentiating factor.'
Age: 59. 'But my Whoop says I'm 56.'Lives: Terenure, DublinFamily: married to Anne, with four adult childrenEducation: St Patrick's College, Cavan; B Comm and postgrad in accounting at University College DublinFavourite film: Once Upon a Time in AmericaRecent read: I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes. 'For some reason, I always gravitate towards the mafia section of a bookstore, but this is one I read recently and enjoyed.'
I tend to start my day pretty early, around 6am. I like to get a bit of me-time in the morning, so I go to the gym for an hour or an hour and a half and then I get into Cherrywood. I try to divide my day into thirds. A third is typical employee engagement, one–on-ones, team meetings. A third I spend on business issues of the day. And then probably a third on more forward-looking stuff, including a good chunk of time spent with board members. I probably travel two weeks out of four, so I do a fair bit in the US and we have a big European footprint as well.
I play quite a bit of golf on weekends; I'd probably call myself an avid golfer. I had a holiday cycling in Sardinia; I wouldn't call myself an avid cyclist. Obviously the usual sort of family stuff. We spend a bit of time in Rosslare.