Jan Byrski specializes in financial innovation law (FinTech, including payment, banking and the insurance market), in legal protection of information (personal data, professional secrets, trade secrets), and IT and TMT, including in particular proceedings before the President of the National Bank of Poland, President of the Polish Financial Supervision Authority, Inspector General for Personal Data Protection, and administrative courts. He provides legal advice to companies and financial institutions operating on the Polish and international markets.
He is a legal expert at the Polish Chamber of Insurance and the Foundation for Development of Non-Cash Transactions (FROB). He is a member of the IAPP (International Association of Privacy Professionals) organization and SABI-IOD (Data Protection Officer Association, Poland), and Vice-President of the FinTech Committee of the Polish Chamber of Information Technology and Telecommunications (PIIT). He is a member of working parties at the KNF Office on the development of financial innovation (FinTech) and MC working groups, including distributed registers and blockchain. He takes part in parliamentary work on the adaptation of Polish law to PSD 2, interchange fee regulation (IF Reg), the GDPR, and numerous amendments to the Act on the Protection of Personal Data and the Act on Payment Services.
He is a speaker at conferences, seminars and training courses in Poland and elsewhere, and a member of the Consultative Council of the IT in Administration monthly. He is the author and co-author of numerous academic and popular-science publications, including the monograph Tajemnica prawnie chroniona w działalności bankowej (Legally-Protected Secret in Banking Operations), which earned him the top award in the Scientiae Legis Excellentia contest for the best PhD dissertation on economic law organized by the National Bank of Poland, as well as the habilitation dissertation “Outsourcing w działalności dostawców usług płatniczych” (Outsourcing in the Activities of Payment Service Providers) (C.H. Beck 2018). He has also received individual recommendations in the Chambers & Partners Europe 2020 and 2021 Banking & Finance ranking, Regulatory Poland, FinTech Legal Poland 2020 and 2021, The Legal 500 EMEA 2020 and 2021 in the category Data privacy and data protection.
He is a professor in Economic Law of the Faculty of Finance at the Cracow University of Economics. He is a graduate of the Faculty of Law and Administration of the Jagiellonian University, and attended the School of German Law of the Jagiellonian University, University of Heidelberg, and the University of Mainz, and the School of Austrian Law of the Jagiellonian University and the University of Vienna. He studied at Ruhr-Universität Bochum on a scholarship awarded by the Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation. He has been on scholarships at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt Universität Greifswald, Johann Gutenberg Universität Mainz, and Max-Planck-Institut für Immaterialgüter-und Wettbewerbsrecht.
He speaks fluent Polish, German and English.
