SoftBank to invest over $1B in German payment company Wirecard

today's FT front page headline 'Wirecard relied on three opaque partners for almost all its profit' 'Dubai-based unit of German payments group was not audited'

'Al Alam Solutions, a Dubai-based payments processor with skeletal operations in the Emirate, is the largest of the three “partner” entities. Wirecard refers clients to Al Alam in return for a share of any processing fees as commission. A former Al Alam employee said the business had six or seven staff in total and “the boss” was Oliver Bellenhaus, a Wirecard executive. The other partners are PayEasy Solutions, a Philippine payments group that shares an office with a Manila bus company, and Singapore-based Senjo. '

https://www.ft.com/content/a7b43142-6675-11e9-9adc-98bf1d35a...

there was more short selling activity in advance of the articles which is now the reason for the investigations (and for the ban of short selling)

Whilst naked short selling can be an offence, in this case the insider trading is the of the short selling before the news came out. The fact its naked happens to be irrelevant to the insider trading case.

I think the German definition of insider trading is more loose and could potentially include someone profiting from spreading fake news.

As a German unicorn, Wirecard seems to be enjoying a certain national handicap which is absent from the British paper’s digging.

A Munich prosecutor threatened investigation into FT and Wirecard was happy to double up on threatening journalists, yet nothing seems to be actually happening. This strengthens the impression that Wirecard is locally protected.

So.... why is a German financial regulator probing a British newspaper? That seems extremely fishy, if FT was wrong then Wirecard should have brought a civil suit for defamation.

They also got a ton of Bitcoins since 2013, so I doubt they are hurting on that particular asset.

We somehow managed to make it work, can’t exactly remember the details but I think at some point it involved us sending them desperate emails (or maybe phone calls, can’t remember exactly) asking them to please change some settings on their side of things so that we would be able to test as close as possible to “live”, it took them at least two or three days if not more to make the change, which created unwanted dead time for us.

To say nothing of the fact that at some point we spent at least two days practically hitting a wall over and over again: we were sending the requests exactly as their not-so-great docs were telling us to do but the response was totally different from what we were expecting. In desperation we somehow managed to contact them (meaning my boss sitting on a phone call with them) to realize that the dev instance they had provided us with still needed some small change on their side of things. Totally non-transparent framework and it all seemed as fickle as a castle made out of sand.

For comparison we had the best experience implementing Stripe, it was like night and day compared to Vantiv. Unfortunately at the end of the day you need to implement what the stakeholders want.

So many companies doing IPOs lately, seems to me we are reaching a top. Private money running out, lets go for public.