Marta De Luca
Regulatory and Licensing Lead, Milan. Ten years on the question that decides whether a business can start at all: who has to be authorised in Italy, by which authority, and what the file has to contain.
Role and office
Background
Marta De Luca works on authorisations: who has to be licensed in Italy, by which authority, and what the file has to contain. Four years inside the compliance function of an Italian payment institution taught her what a supervisor actually reads. She now takes crypto-asset and payment applicants through CONSOB and Banca d'Italia procedures.
Sitting on the regulated side of the table first is the thing that changes how an application is written. A supervisor is not reading a business plan for its ambition. They are looking for the governance, the money flows, the people behind the applicant and the controls that are supposed to catch what goes wrong, and they notice immediately when a file describes intentions rather than arrangements that already exist.
What she works on
- Authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider under MiCA, and the Italian procedure that implements it.
- Payment institutions and IMELs, the Italian electronic money institutions supervised by Banca d'Italia.
- The beneficial owner register: who has to be filed, by when, and what is visible to whom.
- Nominee services and substance, and the line between a legitimate arrangement and one that will not survive scrutiny.
- Trade marks at UIBM, the Italian patent and trade mark office, and how a national filing relates to an EU one.
- The visa routes open to a founder who needs to be present in Italy rather than only to own something there.
Most of these have a sequence problem in common. The authorisation depends on the company, the company depends on the bank, the bank asks about the authorisation, and everything asks who the beneficial owner is. Working out the order in which that knot comes undone is a large part of the job.
Pages she writes
These are the pages Marta writes and keeps up to date. Each of them is checked by Giulia Mancini before publication, so that no page on this site is reviewed by the person who wrote it.
- Crypto Licence in Italy
- MiCA Licence in Italy
- Payment Institution and EMI Licence in Italy
- Trademark Registration in Italy
- Nominee Services in Italy
- Registered Office in Italy
- Virtual Office in Italy
- Beneficial Owner Register in Italy
- Business Bank Account in Italy
- Italy Startup Visa
- Investor Visa for Italy
- Self-Employment Visa for Italy
Pages that have not gone up yet are published one at a time, each after review. The sitemap shows which are live.
What she checks
Review runs in a ring, so that nobody signs off their own work. Giulia Mancini checks Marta's pages, Alessandro Ferri checks Giulia's, and Marta checks the pages Alessandro Ferri writes: corporate tax, VAT and the partita IVA, invoicing, accounts and tax residence.
Reading tax pages from the regulatory side is a useful check in one direction in particular: a tax arrangement that works perfectly well until a supervisor or a bank asks who is really behind the company.
What is not claimed here
Marta does not use an Italian professional title and does not claim membership of any Italian professional order. Those sit in open public registers, a claim to one is confirmed or disproved in about a minute, and we make none. Nor does she hold any position at a supervisory authority: the experience described above is on the applicant side of a regulated firm, which is a different thing and is not a shortcut to anybody.
There are no licence counts on this page, no client names and no application success rates. We hold no such figure that anyone could check, and no authorisation is ever promised in advance: a supervisor decides, on the file, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
How to reach her
Through one form and one inbox. The contact form reaches info@goldblum.ch, and anything about a licence, an authorisation, a trade mark, the beneficial owner filing or a founder visa is answered by Marta. Licensing questions are worth asking early: whether an activity needs an authorisation usually changes which company you should be forming in the first place.
Where a plan is already firm, the onboarding questionnaire has a section for the authorisation you think you need, and answering it saves the first round of questions entirely. The rest of the team is on the team page.