Have they faced anti money laundering lawsuits before? What was the outcome?

Yes, Wise has a history of facing regulatory enforcement actions—which are the government equivalent of lawsuits in the financial sector—over failures in their Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) controls.

Before the current criminal probe in Belgium, Wise faced three major regulatory actions regarding financial crime compliance:

US Multi-State Settlement (July 2025)

Six state financial regulators (including New York, California, and Texas) launched a coordinated action against Wise's US subsidiary over inadequacies in its Bank Secrecy Act and AML programs.

• The Issue: Regulators found that Wise failed to conduct proper due diligence on its customers, lacked sufficient ongoing monitoring to catch suspicious activity, and repeatedly failed to escalate red flags when client behavior changed.
• The Outcome: Wise agreed to pay a $4.2 million penalty. They were also forced into a strict remediation plan, which required them to hire an independent third party to verify their system upgrades and submit quarterly compliance reports to regulators for two years.

Abu Dhabi Global Market (August 2022)

The Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) of Abu Dhabi penalized Wise Nuqud Ltd, its local money service subsidiary in the UAE.

• The Issue: Wise failed to verify the "source of funds" and "source of wealth" for customers they had already identified as high-risk before processing their transactions. Instead, they were only doing these checks after a certain payment volume threshold was reached. They also failed to get senior management approval to establish relationships with these high-risk clients.
• The Outcome: Wise was fined $360,000 (which included a 20% discount for early settlement and full cooperation). The regulator noted that while Wise's controls were broken, they did not find actual instances of money laundering during this specific review.

National Bank of Belgium (2024)

Before the current €500 million criminal probe by Belgian prosecutors, Wise was already on the radar of Belgian banking regulators.

• The Issue: The National Bank of Belgium conducted a review and found severe gaps in Wise's KYC data, discovering that the company lacked basic proof of address for hundreds of thousands of its European customers.
• The Outcome: Rather than a direct fine, Wise was forced into a formal regulatory remediation plan to immediately overhaul its customer identification processes across Europe.