Embedded Finance Review Podcast, episode 49. Published 20 August 2026. Guest: Patrick Liptak, partner at MYLE. Host: Lars Markull.
Lars Markull: If you're building a financial product inside a non-financial brand, the legal question tends to show up late. The product is designed, the provider is picked, the first customer conversations are running, and then somebody asks whether you can actually launch it in the way you have built it.
My guest today has sat on both sides of that conversation, first building and leading in-house legal teams, and now advising companies from the outside. And his view is that most of the pain comes from when legal gets involved rather than from the law itself.
Patrick Liptak is a partner at MYLE, a law firm in Berlin whose name stands for Making Your Life Easier. MYLE advises clients across a full spectrum, from early stage startups through to listed companies, on IT law, data protection and digitalisation projects, and the firm has picked up several accolades along the way. Patrick is also the first lawyer to sit on this podcast, and we recorded this one in person in a studio in Berlin Neukölln rather than over the usual video call.
We get into why companies reach out to a lawyer in the first place, which in Patrick's experience is rarely a founder discovering out of nowhere that the product needs a licence, and much more often a customer or an investor asking them to comply with something before the deal can close. From there we talk about what he wants to see from a product team at the first conversation, why he argues that short contracts are harder to write than long ones and how that connects directly to deal velocity, where he sees companies spending real money on platform tools that give them compliance on paper and little else, what has happened to document quality since teams started drafting with AI, and why some startups are now putting their lawyer on the cap table.
My name is Lars Markull, and I'm the founder of Embedded Finance Review, a newsletter, podcast and event series covering the European embedded finance ecosystem. If you're working on an embedded finance project and want a free intro call to get feedback and meet the right providers and partners, head to embeddedfinancereview.com and request your slot. And now let's dive in.
Welcome
Lars Markull: Hi Patrick, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today?
Patrick Liptak: Great. Thanks for actually meeting for the first time in person.
Lars Markull: That's indeed the case, we are actually meeting in person. As the usual listeners know, typically I record my podcast virtually, but today is one of the few recordings where I'm actually sitting right next to my guest. So Patrick and I, we're sitting here on a couch in Berlin Neukölln, in a recording studio, and having the chance to chat about our topic of legal advice for fintechs and non-financial brands actually in person. And you made this happen, so thank you for setting this up for us.
Patrick Liptak: Yeah, great to meet you actually. Very cosy here, actually sitting right next to you.
What MYLE does
Lars Markull: Indeed. Patrick, my podcast is Embedded Finance Review. We talk about trends in embedded finance, fintech. We are really focused on the builders, people who are building financial products in their space. You're actually the first time a lawyer sits on my podcast. We know each other from the past. Maybe to introduce you and also the kind of work that you do, maybe you can tell us a little bit about yourself and what kind of companies you're working with, and then we will dive deeper into our core topic from there.
Patrick Liptak: Sure. So I'm a partner at MYLE. MYLE is a boutique law firm based in Berlin. I advise a wide variety of clients in the fintech space, from startup to scale-up and also to larger companies, actually also some stock listed companies. We also on many occasions act as DPO for companies and provide DPO services. And basically I work, as you can imagine, like a Swiss army knife for companies. So when there are regulatory questions they would bring us in and we would help to navigate through that.
Why companies actually call a lawyer
Lars Markull: I said we had overlaps in certain projects in the past, and since then have kept in touch. And I think the topic that I reach out to you about quite often is the whole legal advice for introducing new digital products. And that was actually the idea here for the podcast, to talk a little bit about that, which is quite relevant both for non-financial brands and fintechs when they're building new digital products, and then obviously at one point come to a point where they're wondering, okay, can I actually launch this product in the way that I built it?
So maybe you can explain a little bit, because you're supporting quite a few companies in this regard. When companies reach out to you for such support, how does it currently work? Why do they reach out to you, and what's the feedback you can give them at that point in time?
Patrick Liptak: So normally what happens is they identify a need to comply with certain regulation. There can be a couple of reasons. Either they are building a product and they already know, okay, this requires compliance, like a banking product for example. Also maybe they are seeking market acceptance. So clients tell them, okay, if you want to work with us, if you want to deliver a service, if you want to sell us a product, you need to comply with regulation X, Y, Z. Sometimes you also have the situation when an investor from the US would say, okay, I want you to comply with this standard or that standard, I require GDPR compliance.
So that is something where then the need is identified. And based on that, companies are usually quite confused, because there's a lot of regulation in the EU and they have a tough time navigating through all of that. We see it now for example, many of our clients have a little bit of a headache with the EU AI Act, because they are building products in that space, and then they seek a trusted advisor in that field. And this is usually where we would step in, and where actually we can deliver the most value, so where a company actually also becomes a client then of course.
And that is mainly because we all bring a lot of experience to the table when it comes to in-house experience. So I personally worked for many companies before I embarked on the journey with MYLE. I used to build legal departments, I used to lead legal departments. And so I would say I have a fairly good understanding of how companies operate, especially startups and scale-ups in that specific field. And this is also where I would say we can speak the language of the companies.
And then on top of that, we are very much interested in delivering advice at the same speed as the companies that seek our advice. So when this all comes together, I think that's a really good match, because deal velocity is a number one thing for companies and we are really trying to facilitate that. So many of my clients are companies that I actually worked for in the past, or where employees would set up their own startups and then they would seek our advice and reach out to us because we have already built a good relationship in the past.
Not the enemy of the product team
Lars Markull: And you did mention deal velocity, and I think it's quite interesting to dive a little bit deeper into that. Because also from my experience, when I worked in fintech companies or worked with non-financial brands, some of them have a legal counsel, a general counsel, others work with outside parties like yourself with MYLE now. And obviously very often there is the positioning of this lawyer as my counterpart, my enemy in a way. I build a product and now I need to convince the legal counsel to actually allow this product, and sometimes it gets into a bit of an environment where it's like, but I want this, and the lawyer says, no, you cannot do it.
Especially with your background of having been inside different fintechs and non-financial brands building these products, where you obviously, maybe today as well, but especially as an employee of the startup, are quite interested as well to make the product work. Is there a different mindset that you and maybe other lawyers, general counsel, have towards building these products and bringing them out, and not being the enemy, the opponent, of the product teams, trying to prevent everything and make everything 100% safe and boring, so to say?
Patrick Liptak: Yeah, that's a good point. I would say it depends a little bit also on the stage. As a lawyer, if you get involved very early in the product development, then you can help navigate much more easily, because things can be easily played back and forth a little bit. You can discuss ideas, other than at the end of the product development cycle, where you would just have to try to explain a certain risk, and if it should be taken or not, just express a legal opinion on something.