Belgium’s National Bank has publicly identified Wise Europe SA, part of Wise Group PLC (NASDAQ: WSE), as the first firm named under a strengthened policy for disclosing anti-money laundering enforcement actions. The publications, dated 25 August 2026, mark the start of a more transparent approach the supervisor adopted after recommendations from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).
The revised rules apply to administrative measures taken from 1 January 2026 onward.
The National Bank of Belgium supervises Wise Europe SA, the payment institution through which the London-listed money-transfer group serves customers across the European Economic Area under passporting rules.
Under the anti-money-laundering law of 18 September 2017, the bank must in principle publish, by name, certain decisions imposing administrative measures.
It also has the power to announce when an institution has failed to comply with an earlier order to bring its practices into line within a set deadline. Both types of notice now appear on the regulator’s website in relation to Wise Europe.
According to contemporaneous reporting of the official notices, the supervisor found significant shortcomings in the firm’s customer due-diligence framework.
The issues cited include the sharing of information among group entities for AML and counter-terrorist-financing purposes, the identification and verification of customers and their beneficial owners, ongoing monitoring of business relationships and occasional transactions, and the examination of unusual activity.
The bank has instructed Wise Europe to take the steps needed to achieve full compliance by 31 January 2027.
The naming policy is intended to increase accountability and deterrence after earlier criticism that Belgian authorities were too reluctant to identify institutions publicly.
Similar “name-and-shame” tools have been used by other European supervisors and are consistent with the direction of the EU’s sixth Anti-Money Laundering Directive and the new Anti-Money Laundering Authority.
For a fast-growing payments firm that processes millions of cross-border transactions daily, public disclosure of supervisory findings carries reputational weight even when it does not immediately involve a published fine.
Wise Europe has previously been the subject of a routine post-Brexit review by the same supervisor.
That earlier exercise, conducted in 2021, led to a remediation program after gaps were identified in address documentation for a large number of customers.
The company has stated that it implemented the required changes.
Separate criminal inquiries by Belgian prosecutors into possible use of accounts for illicit purposes remain distinct from the National Bank’s administrative process.
The episode illustrates the tension facing passporting payment institutions: a single national licence can concentrate both commercial opportunity and regulatory scrutiny.
Supervisors across Europe are under pressure to demonstrate that digital-first firms apply the same standards of customer knowledge and transaction monitoring expected of traditional banks. How quickly Wise Europe closes the identified gaps, and whether further measures follow the January 2027 deadline, will be watched closely by investors, counterparties and other regulators.