The OCC’s Rejection of bunq: A Continuing Fit-and-Proper Question for DNB The refusal of bunq’s U.S. banking charter is not simply a failed expansion project. For De Nederlandsche Bank (“DNB”), the decision produces information that maps directly onto DNB’s own published criteria for the continuing fitness and propriety of persons
Wise Was Denied a Bank Charter. Will DNB License Qivalis? On 21 July 2026, the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has rejected Wise’s application to establish a national trust bank recently. The decision should attract attention far beyond the United States. The OCC did not treat Wise’s
StablR admitted that EURR and USDR were no longer fully backed after unauthorised access to its platform. The incident raises fundamental questions about minting controls, redemption rights, Payvision-linked management and the MFSA’s supervision.
Days before the MiCA transition ended, Malta authorised an OpenPayd company to provide crypto services across Europe. The controlling owner and the warning signs were public. The MFSA’s assessment was not.
Malta’s Financial Arbiter repeatedly found that OpenPayd improperly credited payments through opaque vIBAN structures. He referred the breaches to the regulator—then denied compensation and blamed the victims’ “greed and gross negligence
The Wolfsberg Group’s new guidance on banking services for non-bank payment service providers addresses a structural weakness in the payment system: banks provide the accounts through which payment institutions collect, pool and redistribute money, while often seeing only part of the underlying payment chain. Wolfsberg does not treat this limited
Københavns Andelskasse and Payvision: Victims Left to Chase Empty Shells Danish authorities have secured another conviction in the Københavns Andelskasse money-laundering scandal. But the case exposes a larger European failure. The victims are not only facing AML breaches. They are facing an enforcement model that confirms wrongdoing after the operating
On 25 June 2026, the Court of Appeal of England and Wales is scheduled to hear the appeal in the Hamblin & Anor v Moorwand Ltd & Anor [2025] EWHC 817 (Ch). The case deserves attention far beyond the United Kingdom. It raises a question that is central to modern
ING’s new AML settlement and the same message ING Belgium has agreed to pay a €1.6 million criminal settlement in a money-laundering investigation linked to transactions involving Didier Reynders, the former Belgian minister and former EU Commissioner for Justice. According to reporting on the Brussels prosecutor’s announcement, the case concerned
A new U.S. class action against Circle raises a fundamental question for the digital financial system: when does a crypto infrastructure provider stop being a neutral technology layer and become legally accountable for enabling the movement of stolen assets? A New Test Case for Crypto Infrastructure Liability A class action
