Services
Business Setup & Company Formation Services
Bank/EMI/PSP Onboarding
Legal & Compliance Support
FinTech Advisory
Tax Advisory
Licensing Strategy (iGaming • Financial • Crypto)
Exclusive Nominee Services
Substance & Business Infrastructure Support
Audit & Accounting Services
Payment Solutions
Contact us
If you need practical legal and compliance support for cross-border operations, please get in touch with a brief overview of your business model, the jurisdictions involved, and your key counterparties—such as banks, EMIs, PSPs, or other partners. Based on that information, a proposed scope of work and recommended next steps can be provided.
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Ready to define the right next step?
Brief us on the objective, jurisdiction and current constraints.
What a business actually needs from a cross-border adviser
Most businesses do not arrive with a legal question. They arrive with a commercial problem that has become a legal one: a payment provider that will not onboard them, a bank that has asked a question nobody can answer, a regulator that wants a licence application rewritten, or a structure built three years ago that no longer survives contact with 2026 rules.
SK Consult works with operating companies, groups and founders on the whole chain — where the entity sits, how it is owned, how it is licensed, where it banks, how it is taxed, and what evidence exists that the arrangement is real. Those questions get decided together, or they get decided badly.
The work is done by senior people. Sergii Kalinovskiy has around twenty years at senior and C-level in law, finance and asset management, and is also Group Head of Legal at Qore Advisory and Head of Legal at Cosmos Finance. Where a mandate requires a licensed firm — a regulated administrator, a statutory auditor, counsel admitted in a particular jurisdiction — that firm is engaged and named. Tell us what the business actually does and we will tell you what is realistic.
Where we are useful
How business mandates are run
Six working principles. They are not slogans — they are the reason a file survives due diligence.
Bankability decides the design
A structure that cannot open and keep an account is not a structure, it is a filing. We test the banking and acquiring route for your actual activity, volumes and counterparties before the incorporation forms are signed, not after the third refusal.
Compliance is designed in, not bolted on
KYC and AML architecture, ownership disclosure, policies and record-keeping are drafted with the structure. Retrofitting compliance onto a live business costs several times more, takes longer, and is visible to anyone who reads the file.
One point of accountability
You deal with one senior lawyer who holds the whole matter — tax, corporate, licensing and banking — rather than four specialists who each answer a fragment and none of whom owns the outcome.
Written scope, written price
Before work starts you get a scope, a deliverable list and a price. Where a number genuinely cannot be fixed — a regulator's timetable, a bank's appetite — it is called an estimate rather than dressed up as a commitment.
Substance you can actually maintain
Substance that exists on paper only fails at the first serious question. We size directors, premises, staffing and decision-making to what the business can genuinely sustain, and we say so plainly when a plan is too thin.
Reversibility is priced in
Every structure is designed with the exit in view: how it is unwound, redomiciled or sold, and what that will cost in tax and regulatory terms. Cheap to enter and expensive to leave is the most common expensive mistake in this field.
The four situations businesses come to us with
Different problems, different work. Most mandates are a version of one of these four.
Building something new
A founder or group needs an entity, a bank, a licence and a tax position that hold together. The order matters: licensing feasibility and banking appetite are established first, and the jurisdiction and ownership structure follow from what will actually be approved. Incorporation is the last step, not the first.
Fixing something that stopped working
An existing structure is failing a specific test — an account has been closed or frozen, a PSP has de-risked the merchant, a regulator has raised a point, an auditor will not sign. The work here is diagnostic first: find what actually broke, then rebuild the minimum necessary rather than starting again out of habit.
Restructuring after the 2026 reform
The Cyprus reform gazetted on 31 December 2025 changed the arithmetic: corporate income tax at 15%, SDC on dividends down to 5% for resident and domiciled individuals, deemed dividend distribution abolished, the Stamp Duty Law abolished, an incorporation-based residency test, and losses carried forward for seven years instead of five. Groups built for the old numbers need to be re-modelled, not assumed.
Getting ready to be examined
An investor, an acquirer, a bank or a regulator is about to read the file. We assemble it the way the reader will: corporate records, ownership chain and register filings, substance evidence, policies, contracts and the tax position — with the weak points identified and either fixed or explained before somebody else finds them.
What we handle for business clients
The list below is what a typical group mandate covers. Individual pieces can be taken on their own.
- Company formation and group architecture in Cyprus, the wider EU and selected non-EU jurisdictions, including holding, operating and IP-owning layers
- Licensing strategy and applications in iGaming, financial services, payments and crypto-assets, including the fit-and-proper file for proposed officers
- Bank, EMI and PSP onboarding for corporate accounts, with the business-model narrative and source-of-funds documentation prepared before submission rather than improvised afterwards
- Payment architecture: acquiring, chargeback exposure under the Mastercard and Visa monitoring programmes, and the operational controls that keep ratios inside threshold
- Tax structuring and effective-rate modelling under the 2026 Cyprus regime, including transfer-pricing documentation against the Local File thresholds of €10m financing, €5m goods and €2.5m other categories
- Substance: directors, premises, local decision-making, and the contemporaneous records that evidence all three
- Beneficial ownership filings and register maintenance — initial filing within 90 days, changes within 45 days, annual confirmation between 1 October and 31 December
- Nominee director and shareholder arrangements where they are genuinely appropriate, inside a fully disclosed structure — see Exclusive Nominee Services
Questions businesses ask first
How quickly can a company be running?
Incorporation in Cyprus is a matter of days once the name is approved and the KYC pack is complete. The realistic constraint is the bank or EMI, which is usually weeks and occasionally longer for higher-risk activity, and a licence, which is measured in months. Anyone quoting a single fast number for all three is quoting the easy part.
Do you work with high-risk sectors?
Yes. iGaming, payments, crypto-assets and comparable activity are a substantial part of the practice. That also means we will tell you plainly when a proposed activity is not bankable in the form you are describing, and what would have to change for it to become bankable.
We already have a structure. Can you take it over?
Usually. We start by reading what exists — corporate records, filings, banking history, tax position — and give you a written view of what is sound, what is fragile and what needs immediate attention. Taking over a structure without that review would mean inheriting risks neither of us has seen.
Do we need a Cyprus company?
Not necessarily. Cyprus is often a good answer for EU-facing operating and holding structures and remains competitive at 15%, but the right jurisdiction follows from where your counterparties, customers, banking and licensing actually sit. We have no incentive to sell you a jurisdiction that does not fit.
How does the audit exemption affect us?
From 6 February 2026 the turnover threshold rose to €300,000, with gross assets of €500,000, both tests met for two consecutive years. An exempt company is not free of obligations: the replacement is a review engagement under ISRE 2400 (Revised), and banks, investors and counterparties frequently still ask for audited figures.
What do you need from us to start?
A clear description of what the business does and how money moves through it, who owns and controls it, what already exists, and what deadline you are working to. From that we can usually tell you within one conversation whether the plan is realistic and what it would take.
Where to go next
This page is general information about the services SK Consult provides to businesses. It is not legal or tax advice on your situation and does not create a client relationship. Rules, thresholds and regulatory practice change. For a view on your own structure, get in touch.
