Growing up, my mother did what a lot of Irish mammies did in the nineties and still do to this day. She opened a credit union account in my name, and each week, whatever she could spare went in. Oftentimes I was brought along to deposit into the account too. It was habit, discipline, and love in equal measure. By the time I was old enough to understand what it meant, there was a modest balance sitting there, building slowly, year after year.
The principle was completely right. Start early. Put something aside consistently. Don't wait until a child is old enough to understand money before you start building it for them.
Years later, working in financial services and eventually starting Legacy, I went back and did the maths on what that account had actually earned over all those years. What I found wasn't a failure of the credit union or the habit my mother built. Credit unions have done more to embed the discipline of saving for children into Irish family life than almost any other institution, and that discipline is the hard part. What I found instead was a missing piece. The money had been saved carefully, but it hadn't really grown. Saving and growing are two different jobs, and only one of them was being done.
That gap, between saving and growing, between a great habit and a complete financial outcome, is the reason I started looking seriously at bare trusts as a structure for Irish families.
What A Bare Trust Actually Is
A bare trust is one of the simplest trust structures in Irish law, and also one of the most useful for parents and grandparents who want to invest for a child.
In plain terms, a settlor, usually a parent or grandparent, puts money into a trust. Trustees, who can include the settlor themselves, hold and manage that money on behalf of a named beneficiary, the child. The child is absolutely entitled to the assets once they turn eighteen. Until then, the trustees manage it for the child's benefit, covering things like maintenance, education, or general wellbeing.
Unlike more complex discretionary trusts, a bare trust doesn't give trustees much room for discretion over who ultimately benefits. There is one named beneficiary, and once they turn eighteen, the assets belong to them outright. That simplicity is exactly why bare trusts work so well as the legal structure behind a child's investment account.
There are real obligations that come with this. Every bare trust in Ireland has to be registered on the Central Register of Beneficial Ownership of Trusts, known as CRBOT, within six months of the trust being created. Trustees also need to keep an internal register up to date with names, dates of birth, PPS numbers, and addresses for everyone involved, and update it whenever anything changes. None of this is complicated in principle. It is precise, though, and easy to get wrong if nobody is tracking the deadlines and the detail for you.
The Issue I Ran Into
When I actually went to set one up, the process itself was the real eye opener.
Bare trusts in Ireland are still, in the main, a paper exercise. You fill in PPS numbers by hand across multiple sections of a form. You need at least one trustee, usually two, plus a settlor, plus full identification documents for everyone involved. Once the form is complete, it gets posted off, and the trust deed itself has to be signed in wet ink. Under Irish law, an electronic signature is not currently valid for executing this particular kind of document. That is a legal requirement, not a technology gap, and it means the whole process runs slower and clunkier than almost everything else in modern banking.
None of that is a reason to avoid doing it. If anything, it is the reason the process needs to be built properly, guided step by step, rather than left to a parent working through a paper form at the kitchen table, trying to remember which box needs a PPS number and which one needs a signature.
That is the gap I set out to close.
It's worth putting the admin in perspective too. Setting up a bare trust properly, gathering the PPS numbers, completing the forms, registering on CRBOT, takes an evening of focused effort from a parent, plus the time it takes for signed documents to go back and forth in the post. Set against eighteen years, that is not a lot to ask. A modest amount of upfront admin, against a child who could be starting adult life with tens of thousands of euro more behind them, simply because a parent didn't let the paperwork put them off. Your future child will thank you for that evening far more than you'll ever remember spending it.
Saving Is Not The Same As Investing
Here is the part that matters most, and the part that took me longest to properly understand.
A credit union account, or a standard bank savings account, is a genuinely good foundation. It protects capital. It builds the discipline of putting money aside regularly, and for a generation of Irish families, that discipline has been the hardest and most important part of the whole equation. Nothing about investing works if the habit of setting money aside isn't there first.
Where these accounts are naturally limited is on the growth side. Deposit interest rates have been low for a long time, and in practical terms that means the money sitting in the account barely grows once you account for inflation. The balance gets bigger mainly because more is being added to it, not because the money itself is doing much work. That isn't a flaw in the account. It's simply not what a deposit account is designed to do.
An investment account works differently. It puts that same money into assets like diversified funds, where it has the chance to compound over time. Compounding simply means growth building on top of growth, and over an eighteen year window, that difference becomes very real money.
The €140 A Month Example
Let's take the most common example in Ireland today. Child Benefit is currently paid at €140 a month, from birth until a child turns eighteen. A parent who sets aside every single payment, without spending any of it, will have contributed €30,240 in total over that time.
If that €140 a month sits in a typical low interest savings or credit union account, earning somewhere around 1% a year, it grows to roughly €33,100 after eighteen years. That is genuine progress compared to doing nothing at all, but it means the account has only earned around €2,900 in growth on top of what was actually put in, across an entire childhood.
If that same €140 a month had instead been invested consistently over eighteen years, growing at an average of 8% a year, which is a commonly used long run assumption for diversified equity investing, it would grow to approximately €67,200. Same monthly contribution. Same eighteen years. More than double the final outcome, with roughly €37,000 of that figure coming purely from growth rather than money the family put in directly.
That is not a small difference. It is the difference between a helpful head start and a genuinely transformative one. The difference between a deposit toward a car and a meaningful deposit toward a home, further education, or simply real financial independence at eighteen.
It is worth being fully honest here too. Investment returns are never guaranteed. Eight percent a year is a long run historical average for diversified equity markets, not a promise, and any eighteen year period will include years that are up and years that are down. Past performance is not a reliable guide to future performance, and the value of investments can fall as well as rise. This example is here to illustrate the power of time and compounding, not to predict an outcome, and none of it should be taken as financial advice for your own circumstances.
There is also a tax piece worth being upfront about. Growth inside funds like ETFs in Ireland is generally subject to exit tax, including a deemed disposal rule that can tax unrealised gains every eight years, even if nothing has actually been sold or withdrawn. That rate has recently moved in the right direction, reduced from 41% to 38% from January 2026, the first cut in over a decade, and the Department of Finance's own review of the funds sector has recommended going further, including removing deemed disposal altogether and aligning fund taxation more closely with standard capital gains tax. None of that further change is confirmed yet, but the direction of travel has been positive, and it's a space worth watching over the years ahead as accounts like this one grow. This is general information, not tax advice, and anyone investing for a child should get up to date guidance for their own situation.
What We Are Building At Legacy
This is the exact gap Legacy is being built to close.
We're building a platform designed to let Irish parents and grandparents set up a Bare Trust investment account for a child without the friction of chasing paper forms and posting documents back and forth. The legal and compliance requirements around bare trusts, the CRBOT registration, the trustee obligations, all still apply in full, because they are the law, and we are building around them properly rather than trying to shortcut them. What we want to remove is the confusion and the manual admin, not the protections that exist for good reason.
The goal is simple. Take the same instinct my mother had, the instinct that lives in so many Irish families, and give it a proper structure to actually work in. Not instead of saving. Alongside it, doing what saving alone was never designed to do.
My mother was right about almost everything. The habit she built was the hard part, and she got that exactly right. What we're trying to add is the second half of the equation, giving that same disciplined saving a way to actually grow alongside it.
Gavin Eiffe, Founder and CEO of Legacy Financial Technologies Ltd.
Legacy provides a technology platform, not financial or tax advice. The value of investments can fall as well as rise. Capital is at risk.