Wirecard
Wirecard AG is a global internet technology and financial services provider which is listed on the German stock exchange (DAX) and is headquartered in Aschheim, district of Munich. The company offers its customers electronic payment transaction services and risk management, as well as the issuing and processing of physical and virtual cards.

Wirecard Card Solutions Ltd. (WDCS) is a wholly owned subsidiary headquartered in Newcastle upon Tyne, with an e-money licence which allows it to issue virtual cards. It provides numerous mobile payment applications and Wirecard's own mobile payment app boon.

The subsidiary Wirecard Bank AG holds a German banking licence, in addition to licences from Visa and Mastercard. Moreover, it has contracts with American Express, Discover/Diners, JCB, Alipay, WeChat Pay, Apple Pay and China UnionPay, among others.

In March 2017, Wirecard acquired Citi Prepaid Card Services and created Wirecard North America, introducing its internet technology, issuing and acquiring services and omnichannel payment applications to the US market.

In January 2020, Wirecard announced that a contract extension will be offered to chief executive Markus Braun.

History

Founding and stock listing
The predecessor company of Wirecard regarding the IPO was InfoGenie AG based in Berlin, whose shares had been listed in the Neuer Markt stock market segment since October 2000. This company was active as an information service provider offering telephone advice hotlines on various topics. When the shares became Penny stocks following price losses, the stock exchange operator Deutsche Börse wanted to exclude InfoGenie from the Neuer Markt, which was prohibited by court in April 2002. In mid-December 2004, an extraordinary general meeting of InfoGenie decided to transfer the non-listed Wire Card, whose core business was real-time payment processing on the Internet including risk assessment, to InfoGenie AG by way of a capital increase against investment in kind on January 1, 2005 and to rename InfoGenie to Wire Card. Thus, Wire Card became a stock corporation listed in the Prime Standard stock market segment through a reverse IPO. In 2006, Wirecard was included in the TecDAX and in September 2018 in the DAX.

International expansion
Wirecard Asia Pacific was founded in Singapore in 2007. In 2008, Wirecard introduced virtual prepaid credit cards for online payments and in the following year a fraud prevention suite for fraud detection that also uses AI and machine learning. In 2014, Wirecard expanded to New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Turkey. With the purchase of Prepaid Card Services from Citigroup, Wirecard has also been represented in North America since 2016. In the same year, the company acquired a South American Internet payment service provider in Brazil.

In 2019, SoftBank invested in Wirecard. With the acquisition of AllScore Payment Services from Beijing, Wirecard has also been represented in China since November 2019.

Products and services 
Wirecard is an international supplier of electronic payment and risk management services. Wirecard offers products and services in the areas of mobile payments, e-commerce, digitization and finance technology. This traditionally comprises the integration of payment methods, payment transactions via e-commerce as well as payment transactions at the stationary checkout (POS). In these areas, Wirecard currently works in cooperation with 280,000 companies (as of December 2018), including Allianz, KLM, Qatar Airways, Rakuten.com  and Transport for London, among others. The transaction volume in 2018 was US$125 billion. In the first half of 2019 the transaction volume grew by 37.5 percent to EUR 77.3 billion.

Mobile payments
Since 2015, Wirecard offers consumers the fully digitalized, mobile payment-app boon., which works independently of banks or network operators. boon. is based on a virtual Mastercard and runs on mobile devices with the Android or iOS operating systems. The Android version is currently available in Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and Ireland. In addition, boon. can be used via Apple Pay in France, Great Britain, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Ireland and Germany. Google Pay supports boon. in France. boon. offers contactless payments via smartphone and tablet through NFC as well as online payments and peer-to-peer transactions.

In the mobile payments sector, Wirecard has negotiated several contracts with telecommunications providers for technical services with regard to mobile smartphone payments based on near-field communication (NFC). The payment processor offers its partners a mobile card reader as a white label programme for the acceptance of card payments via smartphones or tablets.

eCommerce
In terms of acquiring, one focus is travel and transport. Already in 2007, Wirecard took over payments and credit control for the tour operator TUI, and in 2014 for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. The product Supplier and Commission Payments (SCP) by Wirecard is also made to measure the travel sector. It is based on the automatic output of virtual credit cards and enables electronic payments to partners and suppliers, for instance for commission payments. In this way international payments can be made via electronic transmission of virtual credit card numbers.

Since 2014, Wirecard has offered its Checkout Portal – a fully automated application for easily connecting different payment methods in online shops, with a focus on SMEs and virtual marketplaces.

Digitalization of the retail sector
Wirecard also supports high-street retail with digitisation; an example of this is the collaborative project with T-Systems. In 2016, together with the WMF Group, Wirecard developed a mobile app which connects store purchases with online sales.

Alternative Chinese payment methods
Wirecard has been collaborating with Alipay since 2015, to offer Chinese tourists a familiar payment method during their travels in Europe. As part of this, Wirecard has integrated this alternative payment method into the till systems of retailers such as Printemps, The Body Shop and The National Bank of Greece. The payment procedure has also been integrated with retailers at Munich Airport.

Since July 2017, Wirecard has partnered with Tencent to also offer WeChat Pay.

Finance technology
Many FinTech companies work with Wirecard, for instance, using their banking licence. Some well-known partnerships include: Curve, Funding Circle; start-up banks such as Atom and Tandem; money apps including Revolut, Monese and Pockit; spending management apps such as Loot, U Account and Soldo and business accounts like Tide.

mycard2go has been part of Wirecard Bank's portfolio since 2010. It is a prepaid card which can be purchased in stores and is ready to top up following online activation.

Wirecard and the Financial Times controversy 
On January 30, 2019, Wirecard shares plunged after the Financial Times reported that a senior executive was suspected of “falsification of accounts” and “money laundering” in the company’s Asia-Pacific operations. Wirecard issued a statement calling the report “false, inaccurate, misleading and defamatory.” Wirecard also announced a lawsuit against the Financial Times for "unethical reporting" and a lawsuit for market manipulation.

The public prosecutor's office Munich I in February 2019 launched criminal investigations against Financial Times journalist Dan McCrum because of alleged violations of the German Securities Trading Act (Wertpapierhandelsgesetz, WpHG). The German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority BaFin banned short selling Wirecard shares on 18. February 2019 until 18. April 2019. According to BaFin, the measure is not meant to take sides in the controversy between Wirecard and the Financial Times. On 15 October 2019, Financial Times published documents which it claimed to be Wirecard's internal accounting spreadsheets.

Financial data

List of subsidiaries
Wirecard is a global company founded in 1999, which operates across all continents worldwide since 2017.

It entered the U.S. market in 2017 following completion of the takeover of Citi Prepaid Services.  Wirecard took over the Brazilian company MOIP in 2016. The previous year, in 2015, it entered the Indian market with the acquisition of the Great Indian Retail Group's payment business. Wirecard has been strengthening its operations in the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East and Africa since 2014.

See below a list of some Wirecard subsidiaries (not complete):