Wirecard

The company was founded in 1999. In 2002, when it was close to folding at the end of the dot-com bubble, Markus Braun joined as CEO. He consolidated the company and focused the business model on providing internet payment services, initially mainly to porn and gambling websites.[15]

Headquarters of Wirecard AG in Aschheim (near Munich), 2019

The predecessor company of Wirecard regarding the IPO was InfoGenie AG based in Berlin, whose shares had been listed in the Neuer Markt stock market segment since October 2000. This company was active as an information service provider offering telephone advice hotlines on various topics.[16] When the shares became penny stocks following price losses, the stock exchange operator Deutsche Börse wanted to exclude InfoGenie from the Neuer Markt, which was prohibited by court in April 2002.[17] In mid-December 2004, an extraordinary general meeting of InfoGenie decided to transfer the non-listed Wire Card, whose core business was real-time payment processing on the Internet including risk assessment, to InfoGenie AG by way of a capital increase against investment in kind on 1 January 2005, and to rename InfoGenie to Wire Card. Thus, Wire Card became a stock corporation listed in the Prime Standard stock market segment through a reverse IPO.[18] In 2006, Wirecard was included in the TecDAX[19] and in September 2018 in the DAX.[20]

Wirecard Asia Pacific was founded in Singapore in 2007.[21] In 2008, Wirecard introduced virtual prepaid credit cards for online payments[22] and in the following year[23] a fraud prevention suite for fraud detection that also uses AI and machine learning.[24] In 2014, Wirecard expanded to New Zealand, Australia,[25] South Africa[26] and Turkey.[27] With the purchase of Prepaid Card Services from Citigroup, Wirecard has also been represented in North America since 2016.[28] In the same year, the company acquired a South American Internet payment service provider in Brazil.[29]

In 2019, SoftBank invested in Wirecard.[30][31] With the acquisition of AllScore Payment Services from Beijing, Wirecard has also been represented in China since November 2019.[32]

In June 2020, Wirecard announced that €1.9 billion of cash was missing, resulting in a crash in their share price. According to Ernst & Young, a trustee of Wirecard tried to "deceive the auditor", resulting in the bank processor being unable to release the share results for 2019. In a statement, Wirecard announced that it is "working intensively together with the auditor towards a clarification of the situation".[33] Two banks in the Philippines who were allegedly holding the money said that they did not have the sum and never did. As a result, Wirecard's share value decreased by over 72%, resulting in CEO Markus Braun resigning from the position with immediate effect.[34] On 25 June, Wirecard filed for bankruptcy citing "over-indebtedness".[35]

Since 2015, Wirecard offers consumers the fully digitalized,[40] mobile payment-app boon., which works independently of banks or network operators.[41] boon. is based on a virtual Mastercard and runs on mobile devices with the Android or iOS operating systems. The Android version is currently available in Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and Ireland. In addition, boon. can be used via Apple Pay in France, Great Britain, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Ireland[42] and Germany.[43] Google Pay supports boon. in France.[44] boon. offers contactless payments via smartphone and tablet through NFC[45] as well as online payments and peer-to-peer transactions.[46]

In the mobile payments sector, Wirecard has negotiated several contracts with telecommunications providers for technical services with regard to mobile smartphone payments based on near-field communication (NFC). The payment processor offers its partners a mobile card reader as a white label programme for the acceptance of card payments via smartphones or tablets.

In terms of acquiring,[47] one focus is travel and transport. Already in 2007, Wirecard took over payments and credit control for the tour operator TUI,[48][49] and in 2014 for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.[50] The product Supplier and Commission Payments (SCP)[51] by Wirecard is also made to measure the travel sector. It is based on the automatic output of virtual credit cards and enables electronic payments to partners and suppliers, for instance for commission payments. In this way international payments can be made via electronic transmission of virtual credit card numbers.

Since 2014, Wirecard has offered its Checkout Portal – a fully automated application for easily connecting different payment methods in online shops, with a focus on SMEs and virtual marketplaces.

Wirecard also supports high-street retail with digitisation; an example of this is the collaborative project with T-Systems.[52] In 2016, together with the WMF Group, Wirecard developed a mobile app which connects store purchases with online sales.[53]

Wirecard has been collaborating with Alipay since 2015, to offer Chinese tourists a familiar payment method during their travels in Europe. As part of this, Wirecard has integrated this alternative payment method into the till systems of retailers such as Printemps, The Body Shop and The National Bank of Greece.[54][55][56] The payment procedure has also been integrated with retailers at Munich Airport.[57]

Since July 2017, Wirecard has partnered with Tencent to also offer WeChat Pay.[58]

Many FinTech companies work with Wirecard, for instance, using their banking licence. Some well-known partnerships include: Curve, Funding Circle; start-up banks such as Atom[59] and Tandem; money apps including Revolut[60] and Pokit; spending management apps[61] such as Loot,[62] U Account and Soldo.

mycard2go has been part of Wirecard Bank's portfolio since 2010. It is a prepaid card which can be purchased in stores and is ready to top up following online activation.

On 30 January 2019, Wirecard shares plunged after the Financial Times reported that a senior executive was suspected of “falsification of accounts” and “money laundering” in the company's Asia-Pacific operations.[64] Wirecard issued a statement calling the report “false, inaccurate, misleading and defamatory.”[65] Wirecard also announced a lawsuit against the Financial Times for "unethical reporting" and a lawsuit for market manipulation.[66][67]

The public prosecutor's office Munich I in February 2019 launched criminal investigations against Financial Times journalist Dan McCrum because of alleged violations of the German Securities Trading Act (Wertpapierhandelsgesetz, WpHG).[68] The German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority BaFin banned short selling Wirecard shares on 18 February 2019 until 18 April 2019. According to BaFin, the measure is not meant to take sides in the controversy between Wirecard and the Financial Times.[69] On 15 October 2019, Financial Times published documents which it claimed to be Wirecard's internal accounting spreadsheets.[70]

In 2019, the accounting firm KPMG was hired by Wirecard for an independent audit to address the mentioned allegations. In March 2020, Wirecard claimed that KPMG concluded that no discrepancy was determined during the audit.[71] However, on 28 April 2020, Wirecard shares tumbled 26% when the auditor announced that it had not received sufficient documentation to address all allegations of accounting irregularities.[72] Later on 5 June, Wirecard's headquarters were searched by police as part of a criminal investigation into potentially misleading statements to investors by CEO Markus Braun and three other board members regarding the audit.[73] The company then reported on 18 June 2020 that €1.9 billion was missing in cash from the company's accounts following an audit by Ernst & Young.[74] Braun resigned as CEO the following day to be replaced by James Freis. Over the two days, the company's stock fell 72%.[75] On 22 June 2020, Braun was arrested by German police under accusations of "inflating Wirecard AG’s sales volume with fake income."[76]

A report published in June 2020 by the interdisciplinary journalism laboratory Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto stated that persons and organizations publicly critical of Wirecard had been the target of sustained hacking and phishing attempts by a hackers-for-hire group dubbed Dark Basin. According to the report, some of the critical entities, that included hedge funds, short sellers, investigators, and journalists, were "targeted almost daily for months, and continued to receive messages for years.” The report linked the attacks "with high confidence" to the Indian company BellTroX InfoTech which has a history of other hacking-for-hire operations.[77][78] U.S. prosecutors in New York and the FBI have reportedly started an investigation into the hacker-for-hire allegations.[79] Wirecard denied any wrongdoing.[77]