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...
Wise’s response to recent press articles
Combating financial crime is an industry-wide challenge that Wise takes extremely seriously as a financial institution with over 80 regulatory licences globally, enabling us to serve more than 19 million active customers worldwide and process around 4.7 million transactions per day.
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. His office’s enquiries 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. We will continue to engage with the Brussels prosecutor’s office if and when any specific findings are made available to us.
Wise Europe is established in Belgium, from where we serve the rest of Europe through the EU passporting system for financial services. Consequently, law enforcement requests throughout the EEA are currently directed to Belgium, a different set-up to those financial institutions that operate a branch or local entity network and where law enforcement requests would therefore remain with the respective authorities in each country.
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.
Like every financial institution, we face the reality of increasingly sophisticated bad actors attempting to exploit our platform, and we continually invest in tech-enabled systems and teams to stay ahead of ever-evolving threats. We start by verifying customers before they open an account and continue monitoring hundreds of 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 take our responsibility incredibly seriously. Around one third of Wise’s global team is dedicated to protecting our customers from financial crime and this focus is shared across all of our teams.
We will look to keep our owners and the market informed at the appropriate time.
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