Wise faces Belgian money-laundering investigation

- Key insight: The investigation makes Belgium the third authority to fault Wise's anti-money-laundering controls, after U.S. state regulators and the CFPB acted last year.

- What's at stake: Prosecutors are finalizing a direct summons, which is a more common prosecutorial route in Belgium (compared to the U.S.) that takes the case to criminal court without an investigating judge.

- Supporting data: Prosecutors say more than half a billion euros in suspicious transactions, drawn from hundreds of criminal files, are under review.

Overview bullets generated by AI with editorial review.

Wise disclosed Monday that Belgian prosecutors are investigating its European arm over suspected money laundering tied to drug trafficking, fraud and corruption. The stock fell 8% on the day, after dropping as much as 20%.

Prosecutors told American Banker on Monday that more than half a billion euros in suspicious transactions are under review.

The disclosure came in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. By late morning in London, shares in the company had fallen by 14%, recovering slowly through the rest of the trading day.

Wise competes with banks on cross-border payments, and banks and large companies use its technology to move money through a unit it calls Wise Platform.

The Belgian investigation adds a third authority to the regulators that have faulted Wise's controls against money laundering. U.S. state regulators and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, both acted last year.

At the center of the most recent case is Wise Europe, the Belgian-licensed company through which Wise serves the rest of the continent.

The case in Brussels

Brussels prosecutors have been investigating Wise Europe since 2025. The federal police's organized-crime unit, known as DJSOC, is handling the case, a spokesperson for the prosecutor's office told American Banker.

The case grew out of Wise's "repeated appearance" in "hundreds of criminal files received in Belgium," the spokesperson for the prosecutor's office said.

Those files came through European Investigation Orders and so-called international letters rogatory, which are the formal channels countries use to ask one another for help gathering evidence.

In total, the transactions under review "would exceed half a billion" euros, the spokesperson said.

"The findings mainly relate to the use of Wise accounts for criminal purposes, with indications of non-compliance with anti-money laundering, or AML, legislation, particularly due to a lack of proper identification of clients and their activities," the spokesperson for the prosecutor's office said.

The suspected laundering is linked to fraud, corruption and drug trafficking, and investigators are examining whether criminal organizations used Wise Europe's services, according to the statement.

The investigation is "at an advanced stage and is nearing completion," the spokesperson said.

The office said it is finalizing a direct summons, a charge that would send the case straight to criminal court, and plans to hand its findings to the National Bank of Belgium, which licenses and supervises Wise Europe.

A direct summons is a standard route in Belgian law. It lets prosecutors take a case to trial themselves, when they consider the evidence ready, without first referring it to an investigating judge.

Wise's response

In its SEC filing, Wise said it has not been told what investigators found and that commenting now would be premature.

"We are currently working with the Brussels prosecutor to respond to queries about our business, as we routinely do with regulators and law-enforcement authorities," Wise said in the filing, which Chief Executive Kristo Käärmann signed.

The company said in the filing that its dealings with the prosecutor "are still incomplete and no specific findings have been shared with us to date. As such, it would be speculative for us to comment on any allegations."

Much of the filing turns on how Wise is set up in Europe.

Wise Europe is based in Belgium and serves the rest of the region through the EU's passporting system, which lets a company licensed in one member country operate across the bloc.

Because of that, "law enforcement requests throughout the European Economic Area are currently directed to Belgium," the company said.

For a bank with branches in each country, those requests would stay with national authorities, Wise said.

Filing suspicious-activity reports, which flag potentially illicit transactions to authorities, and answering law-enforcement requests "are a normal part of operations and are not, in themselves, indicative of non-compliance ... or of any wrongdoing," the company said.

Wise's filing frames the requests as routine and explains why they concentrate in Belgium, but it does not address the prosecutor's central allegation: that Wise accounts repeatedly surfaced in criminal files because the company failed to properly identify clients and their activities.

Wise also pointed to its size and its spending on compliance.

It said it holds more than 80 regulatory licenses worldwide, serves over 19 million active customers, processes about 4.7 million transactions a day, and assigns roughly a third of its global staff to "protecting our customers from financial crime," according to the filing.

The National Bank of Belgium declined to discuss the case in comments to American Banker.

"The National Bank of Belgium does not comment on individual entities under its supervision," a spokesperson said when asked about Wise's supervisory status and the prosecutor's inquiry.

The bank confirmed that Wise Europe is "a Payment Institution authorised by the National Bank of Belgium" with passporting rights across Europe.

The stakes for Wise's bank business

Gautam Pillai, an analyst at the London brokerage Peel Hunt who covers Wise, told American Banker that the investigation's real threat is to the company's push to sell its technology to other banks.

"Wise is no longer just a consumer cross-border payments app," Pillai said. "It is trying to position itself as critical infrastructure for global banks.

"If questions emerge around anti-money-laundering controls, that directly undermines its ability to scale partnerships like Morgan Stanley and Standard Chartered," he continued.

Both Morgan Stanley and Standard Chartered began using Wise Platform, the unit that rents out Wise's payment network, in late 2024.

Standard Chartered moves money for customers in Asia and the Middle East through the Wise network. Morgan Stanley became the first investment bank to settle corporate cross-border payments on the platform.

For now, "the risk is primarily reputational and strategic, not immediate financial, but that is what matters most for Wise," Pillai said. "The key issue is trust."

He said the one-day plunge in the shares reflected "uncertainty more than fundamentals." No regulator has made findings against Wise in the Belgian case, so "in that sense it looks aggressive.

"But if this evolves into confirmed deficiencies, enforcement action, or even just tighter onboarding and partner scrutiny, then the reaction will prove justified," he said.

If the allegations hold up, the greater danger is not the cost of tighter compliance but slower growth, Pillai said. He pointed to "more friction in onboarding, tougher regulatory oversight and potential hesitancy from banking partners."

A pattern across jurisdictions

Wise's U.S. arm has run into the same kind of trouble that its European arm now faces.

In July 2025, Wise agreed to a $4.2 million settlement with six states (including New York and California) over its anti-money-laundering program.

Wise US had not reviewed the program independently or as often as required, and it had mishandled the investigation and reporting of suspicious activity, "including failure to timely file" suspicious-activity reports, according to the consent order.

It had also not promptly fixed problems flagged in earlier exams, the order said.

Wise has not admitted wrongdoing in connection with the case.

Months earlier, in January 2025, the CFPB ordered Wise to pay about $450,000 to customers and a $44,955 penalty over what the bureau called deceptive marketing of ATM fees and violations of federal rules on electronic fund transfers.

Wise's U.S. dollar accounts run through a sponsor institution that has compliance problems of its own. The OCC in April ordered Community Federal Savings Bank to rebuild its AML program, which regulators said had not kept pace with its rapid growth. That order names only the bank, not Wise.

Wise has downplayed the investigations and reports.

The National Bank of Belgium's earlier look at Wise Europe was "a routine review" as part of "a market-wide exercise in the wake of Brexit" in 2021, a company spokesperson told American Banker on Monday.

Wise "worked closely with our regulator in Belgium and have fully implemented their recommendations," the spokesperson said.

The U.S. multistate exam was also "a routine examination," the spokesperson said Monday, and Wise "fully cooperated with regulators to implement their recommendations."

On the CFPB order, Wise pushed back harder.

The company "strongly disagrees with the CFPB's characterization of Wise's conduct," a spokesperson said Monday, calling the issues "mainly technical." For example, Wise had shown exchange rates to six decimal places instead of four.

Consent orders over compliance failures are relatively common in U.S. banking. Regulators issued more than 50 of them in a 12-month period ending June 2024, according to an analysis by the law firm Goodwin. Those orders covered problems that ranged from capital shortfalls to anti-money-laundering lapses.

What sets the Belgian case apart is that it is criminal rather than civil. The direct summons prosecutors are preparing would send Wise Europe to a criminal court, a step a regulator's administrative settlement does not carry.

Pillai, the Peel Hunt analyst, sees the Belgian case as part of a pattern.

In addition to the aforementioned U.S. and E.U. cases, he pointed out a 2023 British finding that Wise had let a £250 cash withdrawal slip through from a sanctioned person's account.

The most recent investigation out of Brussels "starts to look less like a one-off and more like a pattern of control weaknesses at scale" when set against this backdrop of settlements and reviews," Pillai said. "That is the real concern for investors."

The prosecutor's office is finalizing a direct summons and "will also transmit the results of its findings to the National Bank," a spokesperson for the office told American Banker on Monday.

That would put the case in criminal court and in the hands of the regulator that lets Wise operate across Europe.