Germany-based digital payments group Wirecard to acquire Chinese online payments company AllScore Payment Services for €109M
Olaf Storbeck / Financial Times :
Context & Ripple Effects
By November 2019, German payments had become one of Europe's hottest consolidation arenas: SoftBank had put roughly €900M into Wirecard via a convertible bond that April, and weeks before this deal KKR paid €600M+ for merchant-payments firm Heidelpay. Against that backdrop, Wirecard's €109M purchase of AllScore read as another confident stride — extending a DAX-listed processor into Chinese online payments.
Seen with the corpus's hindsight, the deal now sits awkwardly close to the end of the story: within about seven months, Wirecard disclosed that €1.9B in cash was missing, with 'spurious' balances apparently supplied by a third party, and the company went from $14B+ valuation to full collapse in eight days.
First-order effects
- Wirecard gains an operating foothold in Chinese online payments for €109M, deepening the Asia exposure that SoftBank's convertible-bond backing had helped finance earlier that year.
- AllScore's shareholders exit into a buyer trading near peak confidence, while German payments rivals like KKR-owned Heidelpay face a competitor widening its geographic footprint.
Second-order effects
- The acquisition increased Wirecard's dependence on third-party partners across Asian markets — precisely the kind of relationships its auditor later could not verify when the €1.9B balance question surfaced.
- Wirecard's collapse froze momentum around German/European payments consolidation deals priced off its trajectory, even as scale plays like Worldline-Ingenico ($8.6B) showed the sector's consolidation logic remained intact elsewhere.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, cross-border payments M&A will be diligenced not on reported growth or partner claims but on independently verified balances — shifting audit and regulatory standards for how processors evidence cash held through third parties.
- Germany's flagship fintech becoming its accounting scandal recalibrates investor trust in high-growth payments groups, pushing valuation weight toward verifiable settlement infrastructure over expansion narratives.
The trend: European payments consolidated aggressively on trust in fast-growing processors' reported numbers — until Wirecard's unverifiable Asian balances turned that trust itself into the sector's core diligence problem.