Worldline SA shares cratered on Wednesday, wiping out around €500 million ($744.6 million) of market value on reports that the company allegedly covered up fraud by some of its customers.
Shares in the firm, which describes itself as the largest European payment processer, closed down 38%, having been halted multiple times. That followed the publication of a series of articles co-ordinated by the European journalism network EIC, which claimed the firm had ignored warnings and continued to do business with prohibited and other high-risk customers in recent years, effectively enabling some fraudulent transactions to continue.
The accusations upend the French firm’s attempted turnaround just as economic headwinds dent consumer confidence. And it will do little to help the payments industry shake off the stigma of Wirecard’s failure in 2020 after an accounting scandal that led to the arrest of its chief executive officer and left the German firm unable to find more than US$2 billion ($2.56 billion) missing from its balance sheet.
Worldline, which handles hundreds of billions of euros in transactions every year and had a market value of €1.3 billion at Tuesday’s close, said in a statement that its executive management and board of directors are “fully committed to strict compliance with regulation and risk prevention standards and to strictly enforce related rules and procedures with zero-tolerance.”
Newspaper Reports
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Despite moves to clean up its customer base, a report by Dutch newspaper NRC alleged that Worldline in “recent years” didn’t ban lucrative customers with high fraud rates even as its risk management department pressed for stricter checks. Swedish paper Dagens Nyheter said that Worldline moved multiple high-risk clients from Worldline Belgium to its Swedish subsidiary to hide them there after credit-card provider Visa Inc. raised alarms.
German magazine Spiegel said that Frankfurt-based Payone, which is majority owned by Wordline, failed to thoroughly check “dubious clients”, despite its legal obligations. For example, customers of dating providers in Payone’s portfolio repeatedly noticed debits they could not explain.
Worldline is seen as a legacy payments service provider which competes with relatively newer players such as Adyen NV and Stripe Inc. Its shares more than quintupled between 2014 and 2021 giving the company a market capitalisation of nearly €24 billion at its peak. They have plummeted 96% since then. Its website lists banks including UniCredit SpA, BNP Paribas SA, retailer Subway and travel website Trip.com as some of the businesses it works with.
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The firm has been struggling with the long-term effects of links to high-risk clients ever since late 2023, when its stock cratered after it announced it was cutting ties with some customers. That was shortly after the German financial watchdog Bafin — still reeling from its failure to prevent the Wirecard scandal — imposed severe restrictions on its Payone subsidiary in the country for failing to prevent credit card fraud by some third parties.
While Worldline’s activities in the payment sector can be traced back to the 1970s, the firm’s modern incarnation was created as the electronic payment unit of French computer services firm Atos Plc in the 2000s. It was listed in 2014 and spent the following years consolidating the sector with a string of acquisitions, including a purchase of SIX Group’s payment business for €2.3 billion in 2018.
That deal has left SIX as the firm’s largest shareholder, with a 10.5% stake at the end of 2024, according to Worldline’s website. A representative for SIX declined to comment.
In 2023, it lowered its sales outlook, saying consumers are growing more cautious and spending less, hurting the company’s growth and profitability and prompting other payments firms shares to drop. French lender Credit Agricole SA acquired a 7% stake in 2024 to help stabilise its struggling payments partner and strengthen a joint venture announced in 2023. A spokesperson for the French lender declined to comment.
Worldline’s tanking shares adds to the challenges facing new Chief Executive Officer Pierre-Antoine Vacheron, an industry veteran who took on the role in March after the slew of profit warnings prompted Gilles Grapinet’s exit. The firm reported group revenue of €1.1 billion in the first quarter of 2025, noting that revenue in its financial services business line was down 9% on “already identified client terminations.”
