Worldline Mulls Suit Over Media Reports on Alleged Fraud Lapses

Worldline is reportedly weighing legal action following media allegations that the company permitted customer fraud.

In a call with analysts late Wednesday (June 25) Pierre-Antoine Vacheron, chief executive of the French payments firm, blamed reports by European media collective EIC (European Investigative Collaborations) for the sharp drop in his company’s stock.

Per a report by Bloomberg News, Vacheron said the company had been “attacked” by the media, and that there was “nothing new” in the reports aside from an “unacceptable narrative.”

The report notes that shares in Worldline, which bills itself as Europe’s largest payments processor, had closed down 38% earlier Wednesday, after being halted several times.

This came after a series of articles by a variety of news outlets in Europe, under the umbrella of journalism network EIC, alleging that Worldline had ignored warnings and done business with high-risk customers such as gambling and adult dating sites, essentially permitting fraud to continue unchecked.

The reports, citing internal Worldline documents, also said the company ignored warnings about fraudulent clients, choosing to retain them because they brought in revenue. If a division had too many of these clients, Worldline would shift them to another division, the reports said.

Worldline had issued a statement following the publication of those reports, saying the company was “fully committed to strict compliance with regulation and risk prevention standards and to strictly enforce related rules and procedures with zero-tolerance.”

Vacheron said during the call that the company had boosted its compliance standards in recent years, touting Worldline’s “rigorous” approach to merchants. He added that he is considering legal action against EIC outlets.

PYMNTS explored some of the challenges facing companies in adopting proper compliance measures in a recent interview with Greenlite AI CEO Will Lawrence.

“The last 20 years of compliance has been broadly building systems that help you identify risks,” Lawrence said in an interview with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster. “What happens when it goes wrong? That’s when a human gets involved. It’s a very labor-intensive and operationally intensive process.”

Lawrence cited a study which argued that 85% of what compliance investigators do is non-analytical work, such as document processing or filling out forms.

“If you told me my sales team was only going to spend 15% of their time selling, I’d be very concerned,” he said. “But we’ve tolerated that in compliance.”