The “Dirty Payments” investigation confirms the governance failings of a company thirsty for growth.
Worldline Stock Plummets After “Dirty Payments” Investigation
It’s not a happy anniversary. Eleven years, less one day, after its introduction to the Paris Stock Exchange, following its split from the Atos group, the share price of the French payments champion Worldline plummeted by 38.26% on Wednesday, June 25th, triggered by the publication on the same day of a journalistic investigation titled “Dirty Payments.”
Coordinated by the European Investigative Collaborations network and published by European media outlets such as Mediapart in France, Der Spiegel in Germany, and Le Soir in Belgium, this work reveals the company’s activities with so-called high-risk (HBR) clients because they are linked to gambling, pornography, and even prostitution. The company allegedly went so far as to transfer several HBR clients from Worldline Belgium to its Swedish subsidiary in order to conceal them after a report from the Visa credit card group.
Worldline does not deny having worked with this type of risky client. Following an alert issued in the fall of 2023 by BaFin, the German financial markets authority, the group says it has strengthened its procedures and conducted “a thorough review” of its HBR portfolio in order to terminate commercial relationships identified as non-compliant, which represented approximately 130 million euros in revenue in 2024.
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