Preventing and combating financial crime at Wise

Earlier today, Belgian newspaper, Le Soir, published allegations about Wise Europe. We take these allegations and our responsibility to prevent and combat financial crime, including money laundering and fraud, extremely seriously. We set out below additional information about our fight against financial crime.

Addressing the points raised in recent press reports

The Brussels prosecutor. As we said in our earlier statement, we have been working with the Brussels prosecutor to respond to queries about Wise Europe, as we routinely do with regulators and law enforcement authorities. This engagement with the prosecutor has taken place sporadically over the past several months, with queries raised from time to time and duly and appropriately addressed by Wise Europe.

Press reports suggest that the prosecutor's interest in Wise Europe appears to be linked to the number of law enforcement requests his office has received. This should be understood in the context of how Wise Europe operates in the EEA.

Passporting in Europe. Wise Europe is established in Belgium and serves customers across the rest of Europe from there under the EU passporting system for financial services. As a result, law enforcement requests from every EEA country are directed to, and therefore consolidated in, Belgium rather than remaining with local authorities in each country as they would for institutions that operate across Europe through a network of branches or legal entities in each country. This means requests for information that would otherwise be dealt with by many national authorities are, for Wise Europe, aggregated in one place.

All financial institutions are expected to respond to requests for information from law enforcement agencies and submit suspicious activity reports to the relevant authorities 一 these are a normal part of operations and are not, in themselves, indicative of non-compliance with anti-money laundering requirements or of any wrongdoing.

Recent press reports. Wise Europe is subject by law to a number of disclosure prohibitions that prevent it from commenting on specific cases where Wise may be mentioned. However, it is important to note that criminal networks typically use a variety of different financial institutions to move the proceeds of their scams across the international financial system. In the specific cases that have been mentioned, it is not accurate to conclude that Wise alone has been used to move anywhere near the total alleged value of the funds victims may have lost across such a network.

Using our sophisticated systems, Wise is able to self-detect or block a significant proportion of suspicious activity. Separately, law enforcement agencies have their own information, methods and sources when building an investigation, and so there will be customers or transactions that we are first alerted to by law enforcement. In both instances, we focus on taking the appropriate action to investigate, suspend transactions or accounts and, where necessary, offboard customers.

Wise takes financial crime and protecting its customers incredibly seriously

As a financial institution with over 80 regulatory licenses and serving over 19 million active customers, we have always made preventing and combating financial crime one of the core pillars of our strategy. It is a top priority for us, it is central to how we operate, and it is embedded throughout our business. Our customers trust us with their money because we are transparent in how we operate and we keep their money safe. In the financial year 2026, we processed over €200 billion in cross-border transactions.

We do not tolerate the abuse of our platform or our services, and we take every claim of financial crime extremely seriously. Our role is to minimize and mitigate this activity and to keep our platform safe for everyone who relies on it.

A rigorous controls framework is the foundation of how we operate

We have built a multi-layered compliance function spanning anti-money laundering, fraud, risk and verification teams and systems. These teams and systems serve to protect our platform end-to-end, from customer onboarding and identity verification, through ongoing monitoring to regulatory reporting and engagement across the jurisdictions in which we operate.

We run a machine-learning model before customers are even onboarded to decline onboarding to those we assess as very high risk and likely to abuse our service. We monitor nearly 1,000 data points in real time as customers use our products, with teams reviewing transactions, offboarding customers when needed, and proactively reporting suspicious activity to law enforcement. We do this at scale, processing 4.7 million transactions every day.

Our Belgian subsidiary, Wise Europe, requires every potential customer in the EEA to provide a valid government-issued identity document, such as a passport, as proof of their identity. Wise Europe then matches each customer against the identity document they provide.

We invest to stay ahead of the threat

Like all financial services institutions, we face the reality of increasingly sophisticated bad actors attempting to exploit our platform for financial crime such as fraud, scams and money laundering.

We continually invest in tech-enabled systems and teams to detect and disrupt ever-evolving threats as we build more products to meet the needs of more customers. Since 2022, we’ve added over 2,000 people to our teams focused on preventing and detecting financial crime and fraud. We have improved how well our models are able to identify suspicious activity - we now run four times more machine learning and AI models, using 2.5 times more data points, to detect and stop abuse of our platform.

To help identify bad actors before they can abuse our service, we continue to expand our use of external intelligence providers including Cifas (the UK's leading fraud prevention service that manages the largest database of fraud risk in the UK) and Belgium's Checkdoc (to verify whether Belgian identity documents are valid). We have increased the speed at which we can freeze accounts suspected of being abused, and we have established regionalized financial crime investigation teams with in-depth expertise in the crime typologies specific to each region.

Finally, we work closely with our regulators and law enforcement authorities to stop the potential abuse of our service.

This is a fight we’re in together with our peers

Financial crime is an industry-wide challenge. In 2025, the Global Anti-Scam Alliance estimated that around €380 billion was lost to scams worldwide, and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that between 2 and 5 percent of global GDP, €715 billion to €1.87 trillion, is laundered every year. While this is a collective effort, we never lose sight of our own responsibility to protect our customers who rely on us.

In that context, while we cannot comment on the accuracy of the €500 million figure quoted in the press, it is worth noting that the number would represent approximately 0.2% of our annual cross-border volume.

Our focus remains resolute

We continually review, test and monitor our systems and our teams, and we are confident in the processes we have in place. We have significant regulatory experience across our 80+ global licenses and 8 connections to domestic payment systems around the world, adapting our business to regulatory change. As a well-capitalized business with a clear capital allocation strategy, we are able to keep investing, with that investment carefully balanced to ensure our systems and teams keep pace with our growth.

The framework we have in place gives us the foundation and confidence to serve our 19 million customers safely and reliably.

We will continue to keep our owners and the market appropriately informed.