Our CEO, Artur Reiter, was in Dublin recently. Like most of his trips to Ireland, the visit was about staying close to a market we have been engaged with for some time, and one we are now investing in more deliberately.

That deliberation is becoming concrete. Two projects with Irish players are kicking off in the coming weeks, in May and June, with more to come in H2.

Ireland is a market that looks impressive in the data and feels even more consequential on the ground. The conversations Artur had there confirmed what we have been seeing: the Irish fund industry is growing fast, the operational stakes are rising, and the infrastructure supporting depositary oversight has not kept pace with either.

This article is our attempt to explain what we see in Ireland, and why it matters.

A market that’s outgrown its own infrastructure 

The scale of the Irish fund industry is difficult to fully appreciate until you look at the numbers together. 

€5.3 trillion  in fund assets under management (Q3 2025, Central Bank of Ireland) 

9,254  funds domiciled in Ireland, up from roughly 8,000 five years ago 

2nd  largest fund domicile in Europe, behind Luxembourg 

~€953 billion  in Irish AIF NAV at Q3 2025, approaching the €1 trillion threshold 

$28B → $169B  growth in private credit AuM in Irish funds between 2020 and 2023 

€400 billion+  in net inflows in 2025 alone (EFAMA quarterly data) 

The numbers worth focusing on are not the headline ones. They are the segments where depositary oversight is most operationally demanding: alternative investment funds, complex UCITS strategies, private credit, real assets, and the structures supporting them. 

Irish AIFs alone are approaching €1 trillion in net asset value. Private credit AuM in Irish funds grew roughly six-fold in three years. The Investment Limited Partnership reform of 2021 has produced more than 50 new vehicles, almost all of them in private markets strategies that demand non-custody asset verification, look-through analysis, and continuous cash-flow monitoring. 

The complexity of these funds, private credit, real assets, infrastructure, ELTIFs, semi-liquid evergreen structures, has grown considerably faster than the headline fund count suggests. These are not products that can be overseen with the same tools and processes that worked when the market was half the size. 

That gap, between the operational reality of what Irish depositaries are now being asked to oversee and the infrastructure they have to do it with, is structural, and it is widening. 

The regulatory calendar is the most loaded it’s ever been 

Ireland’s depositaries are not just facing volume pressure. They are facing a concentrated wave of regulatory change arriving at the same time. 

AIFMD II transposition was due in April 2026, essentially now. The directive introduces new requirements around depositary oversight of loan origination, enhanced delegation monitoring, and expanded supervisory reporting. For Irish depositaries, this is not theoretical. The Central Bank of Ireland has identified depositary governance and oversight as a specific supervisory priority for 2026, with a thematic review of hard-to-value asset oversight planned, alongside a compliance function review and a dedicated DORA compliance assessment. 

DORA itself has been live since January 2025. Irish depositaries must now maintain formal ICT risk frameworks, incident reporting processes, third-party technology registers with documented exit strategies, and regular resilience testing. The CBI designated DORA compliance a prescribed contravention under the Individual Accountability Framework, which means personal liability for senior individuals, not just institutional fines. 

And T+1 settlement is coming for European markets on 11 October 2027. For Irish operations, the time-zone pressure is acute. The 5-hour gap between Dublin and New York means same-day settlement processes must be operationally ready well before the deadline. Cash flow reconciliation, settlement instruction processing, and NAV determination windows all compress dramatically. 

These are not separate problems. They converge on the same operational layer: the core depositary workflow. The institutions that handle this well will be those that have replaced fragmented, manual processes with platforms that centralise data, automate execution, and generate the audit evidence these frameworks demand. 

What the ground feels like 

The visit was not a market survey. It was a series of conversations with people who run depositary operations for a living. One of them was with Brendan Toolan, General Manager at Mitsubishi UFJ Investor Services & Banking (Luxembourg) S.A., Dublin Branch. A leader who has seen this industry transform from the inside, across multiple regulatory cycles. 

The conversations were not about any particular product or platform. They were about where the complexity in depositary work is heading, and what institutions actually need to keep pace with it. 

Across those conversations, Artur laid out a vision of where this is heading: technology progressively claims the execution layer of depositary oversight, and people move upstream. They orchestrate. They approve. They spend more time on the work that genuinely creates value for their business and their clients. 

The reaction was not scepticism. It was “yes, and how soon?” That is a different conversation than we were having two years ago. 

That kind of exchange is why being in a market matters. The data tells you it is growing. The people in it tell you what that growth actually costs operationally, and what it demands. 

The Ireland thesis 

Most of our clients do not operate in a single jurisdiction. They run funds across Luxembourg, Ireland, and increasingly across the rest of Europe, and they need depositary oversight that works consistently across all of them. Ireland has always been part of that picture for us. 

What has changed is the pace. Several of our existing clients already have meaningful Irish operations. We are currently onboarding clients with a direct Irish presence. And the pipeline of conversations we are having in the market is growing. 

Irish exposure is not something we are building towards from a distance. It is coming to us, and it is accelerating. 

2026 is the year we formalise that. Ireland is an active market for Depowise, not a future one. 

Our platform is built for exactly the conditions the Irish market presents: high fund volumes across UCITS and AIFs, a mix of custody and non-custody asset types, a demanding regulatory environment, and depositaries who need to scale their oversight capacity without scaling their headcount proportionally. 

Depowise builds technology for depositaries. The Depowise platform supports Cash Flow Monitoring, Safekeeping, and Oversight in one operating environment, helping depositaries manage their core duties with greater consistency, control, and efficiency. Depowise serves institutions managing 2,500+ funds and over €2 trillion in assets.