Wirecard administrator agrees deals on sale of UK, Brazil assets
Wirecard Ag
€48.90
19:00 22/03/17
Collapsed payments company Wirecard has agreed to sell the remnants of its UK business to Railsbank, a UK start-up backed by Visa, administrator Michael Jaffe said on Friday.
Railsbank, a rival banking and payments infrastructure-provider, will now buy the remaining assets of the failed German company’s Wirecard Card Solutions (WCS) unit, he added.
The firm had also agreed a deal to sell its operations in Brazil to a subsidiary of PagSeguro Digital for an undisclosed sum.
Several “well-known interested parties have submitted indicative offers” for Wirecard AG's core business, the so-called acquiring and issuing business, Jaffe said in a statement.
“The recycling processes for the other Wirecard holdings around the world are also making progress,” he said.
“The sale of Wirecard Brazil, as the first commercial success, is all the more gratifying as the framework conditions in the Wirecard insolvency proceedings were and continue to be extremely difficult. We are pleased that a good solution could be found here so quickly. The proceeds from the realization will benefit the creditors.”
Wirecard announced in June that it was unable to locate $2bn worth of cash in its trust accounts, causing the company once valued at $13bn to collapse into bankruptcy.
Administrators are in the middle of selling off parts of the company and last month said more than 140 parties had shown an interest in various parts of the company. WCS issued prepaid cards and processed payments for other financial start-ups that did not yet have the necessary licences.
WCS ran into trouble when it was temporarily suspended by UK regulator, the Financial Conduct authority in June. Its fintech clients were also forced to cease operations, freezing hundreds of thousands of customer accounts for several days.
Many of WCS’ clients have switched payment issuers, leaving WCS with a reduced client base, for which it provided card issuance, account top-ups and other e-money services for online-only banks such as Revolut and Monzo.