A look at little-known UK-based fintech Transactive, which processes €1B+ monthly and has UK and Lithuania licenses, and questions about staff ties to scammers
In the space of just five years, a little-known company on the outskirts of London has grown into a payments-industry powerhouse … Tweets: @donalgriffin1 , @fleming77 , and @silvermanjacob Tweets: Donal Griffin / @donalgriffin1 : The FCA gave an electronic-money license to a tiny company in London, despite top employees' troubled pasts and a key investor's role in a $1b fraud. It became an industry powerhouse - but is now accused of serious wrongdoing. Latest via @BloombergUK. https://www.bloomberg.com/... Jane Fleming / @fleming77 : In the space of just five years, a little-known company on the outskirts of London has grown into a payments-industry powerhouse https://twitter.com/... Jacob Silverman / @silvermanjacob : “with an ability to service clients from ‘compliance-intense industries’ including cryptocurrencies, gambling and foreign-exchange trading” https://www.bloomberg.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Transactive is the sharpest case yet inside a wave Bloomberg has been tracking since early 2022, when it counted 200+ electronic-money institutions approved by UK and European regulators since 2018 — several already facing money-laundering and fraud allegations (that licensing boom was the backdrop). A company few outside payments had heard of now clears more than €1 billion a month under dual UK and Lithuanian licenses.
What changed today is the accountability layer: Bloomberg's Donal Griffin, Jane Fleming, and Jacob Silverman report the FCA granted that London license despite top employees' troubled pasts and a key investor's role in a $1 billion fraud. It is the same trust question regulators applied to consumer brands when they made Revolut simplify ownership for a banking license (SoftBank's compensation fight) — here pointed at an infrastructure processor nobody was watching.
First-order effects
- The FCA faces direct questions about its own due diligence: the reporting alleges the license went to a firm whose leadership and key investor carried fraud-linked histories at approval time.
- Transactive's counterparties and partners processing through its rails must now re-underwrite exposure to a processor accused of serious wrongdoing, with both its UK and Lithuanian authorizations on the table.
Second-order effects
- Lithuania's role as the EU licensing gateway for payments firms comes under the same spotlight as London's — a second jurisdiction's regulator effectively co-signed Transactive's credibility, so both regimes' screening standards get tested publicly.
- Rivals with clean provenance gain a commercial weapon: in license-based infrastructure, as with Square routing payments through partner banks via Cambr (banking-license leverage), counterparties pay for the least risky rail, not the cheapest one.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern from the 2018-onward EMI wave holds, fit-and-proper vetting of executives and investors moves ahead of license issuance rather than after it — the enforcement-by-designation model the US used when FinCEN labeled Bitzlato a money-laundering concern (the Bitzlato action) becoming standard pre-screening for payment processors.
- The structural risk is a two-tier payments market: scale processors that survive regulatory audit consolidate flows, while thinly-vetted licensed firms become unbankable by mainstream counterparties regardless of their formal authorizations.
The trend: E-money licensing regimes built for speed-to-market since 2018 are colliding with financial-crime scrutiny, pushing UK and EU regulators to vet the people and investors behind payment processors as strictly as the capital they hold.