Wirecard filed for insolvency in 2020 after discovering that €1.9 billion in reported cash was missing.
Wirecard was a German payments company that grew rapidly and joined the DAX stock-index system. In June 2020, its auditor, Ernst & Young, said it could not verify the existence of €1.9 billion in trust-account balances that Wirecard had reported as cash.
The company acknowledged that the money probably did not exist and filed for insolvency on 25 June 2020. The collapse exposed failures involving the company’s management, auditor, supervisory bodies, and regulators. Former chief executive Markus Braun was arrested and later tried in Germany; he denied the allegations.
The scandal is sometimes confused with a routine bank failure, but Wirecard was primarily a payments processor and technology company rather than a conventional retail bank. Its collapse also became a major political and regulatory issue in Germany and prompted reforms to financial oversight.