Wirecard

Founding and early business model

Wirecard was founded in 1999 and took care of the technical processing of credit card payments for online vendors. According to Der Spiegel, its clientele initially "consisted primarily of porno and gambling sites". In 2002, when it was close to folding at the end of the dot-com bubble, Markus Braun injected capital and joined as CEO. He consolidated the company and focused the business model on providing internet payment services, initially mainly to porn and gambling websites.

Stock listing and relation to InfoGenie AG

Wirecard became a public stock corporation (listed in the Prime Standard stock market segment) through a reverse IPO, merging with a struggling existing public corporation, InfoGenie AG. Based in Berlin, InfoGenie shares had been listed in the Neuer Markt stock market segment since October 2000 as an information service provider offering telephone advice hotlines on various topics. When the shares became penny stocks following price losses, the stock exchange operator Deutsche Börse wanted to exclude InfoGenie from the Neuer Markt, but this was disallowed by a court in April 2002. In mid-December 2004, InfoGenie decided to merge with the non-listed Wirecard by way of a capital increase against investment in kind, and to change its name to Wire Card. This proceeded on 1 January 2005, and Wire Card became a public corporation. In 2006, Wirecard was included in the TecDAX and in September 2018 in the DAX.

International expansion

Wirecard Asia Pacific was founded in Singapore in 2007. In 2008, Wirecard introduced virtual prepaid credit cards for online payments and in the following year a fraud prevention suite for fraud detection. In 2014, Wirecard expanded to New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Turkey. With the purchase of Prepaid Card Services from Citigroup, Wirecard also began to be represented in the United States in 2016. In the same year, the company acquired a South American Internet payment service provider in Brazil. In 2019, SoftBank invested in Wirecard. With the acquisition of AllScore Payment Services from Beijing, Wirecard also began to be represented in China as of November 2019.