The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has delivered a pointed lesson in the difference between regulatory openness and regulatory leniency. In two separate decisions that have reverberated across the fintech industry, the OCC rejected the national bank charter application of Dutch neobank bunq and denied cross-border payments giant Wise its bid for a national trust bank charter. The rulings arrived even as OCC Comptroller Jonathan Gould publicly declared his agency "open for business," having fielded 40 de novo applications over an 18-month span. The message embedded in both denial letters is unambiguous: the federal chartering door is open, but walking through it demands more than ambition and a European track record.
Two Applications, Two Distinct Failure Modes
What makes these twin rejections particularly instructive is that bunq and Wise did not fail for the same reasons. The OCC's written analyses reveal two structurally different breakdowns, each offering a separate cautionary lesson for any non-bank institution contemplating a federal charter in the United States.
bunq, which serves more than 20 million users across the European Union and has built one of the continent's most recognizable digital banking brands, sought a full-service national bank charter in New York. The application envisioned issuing deposit accounts and unsecured credit cards under a subscription model — an aggressive pivot into US consumer credit. The OCC's rejection under 12 C.F.R. § 5.20 identified fundamental structural deficiencies. The neobank initially proposed $50 million in capital, a figure it later revised upward to $58.3 million, yet failed to provide verified source documentation or any coherent explanation of how that capital would absorb projected losses under stress scenarios. The agency found bunq's credit loss allowances and marketing assumptions unrealistic given the ferocity of competition in the US credit card market, noting that the bank's European profitability had only recently stabilized amid a period of elevated interest rates.
The governance critique was equally damning. The OCC found that bunq's proposed leadership team lacked direct experience in US unsecured credit underwriting, demonstrated insufficient familiarity with American banking law, and relied on a part-time executive structure ill-suited to the demands of running a federally chartered depository institution. Operating a profitable EU digital deposit platform, the regulator made clear, does not translate into the competencies required to manage a US credit book. The implicit message is that European success is not a proxy for American regulatory readiness.
Wise's Compliance Trap
Wise's path to denial was entirely different — and in some respects more sobering, because the company's application was not defeated by financial modeling failures but by its own enforcement history. Wise had sought a national trust bank charter in Austin, a vehicle that would have granted direct access to federal payment infrastructure without the full deposit-insurance obligations that accompany a consumer banking charter. That ambition collapsed under the weight of a consent order.
In July 2025, Wise US entered into a $4.2 million multistate consent order with six state regulators to resolve serious anti-money laundering (AML) and countering the financing of terrorism (CFT) failures. The violations included late filings of Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) and demonstrably weak transaction monitoring controls. The timing proved fatal: the consent order was executed less than a month after Wise had submitted its trust charter filing. The OCC concluded that it could not extend federal chartering privileges to an entity whose parent company was simultaneously grappling with systemic AML compliance deficiencies — and that the sequencing of events made the situation all the more difficult to overlook.
This is the consent order trap in its starkest form. Regulators operate in a supervisory sequence: remediation must be demonstrably complete and verified before a firm can credibly present itself as fit for a federal charter. Filing for a charter while an enforcement action remains unresolved does not merely complicate the application — it can render the entire enterprise indefensible.
The Circle Contrast and What It Reveals
Against this backdrop, the success of Circle stands out as a deliberate counterpoint. Circle secured an OCC national trust charter by rigorously isolating reserve management, custody, and settlement functions from consumer lending activities. The product scope matched the risk controls with precision. There was no ambiguity about what the charter would permit, and no legacy enforcement baggage to explain away. Circle's approach illustrates a principle the OCC appears to be enforcing consistently: specialized federal charters are attainable, but only when the applicant's operational architecture directly mirrors the risk profile the charter is designed to cover.
What This Means for Fintech's US Expansion Ambitions
For the broader universe of fintech firms and cross-border payment providers still mapping their US regulatory strategies, these denials crystallize several non-negotiable conditions. Capital commitments must be fully documented, binding, and stress-tested against realistic loss scenarios — not revised incrementally without verification. Governance must feature executives with direct, demonstrable experience in the specific US asset classes and regulatory frameworks the charter will govern. And compliance records must be clean before the application is submitted, not in the process of being cleaned while the application sits with the OCC.
Gould's "open for business" framing is not rhetorical noise. Forty de novo applications in eighteen months represents genuine regulatory appetite. But the bunq and Wise decisions confirm that the OCC is applying rigorous underwriting logic to the chartering process itself — scrutinizing applicants the way a well-run bank might scrutinize a borrower. The federal charter remains a powerful prize for fintechs seeking to escape the constraints and costs of sponsor-bank relationships. Winning it, however, will require the same discipline and preparation that regulators demand of every institution they supervise.
Written by the editorial team — independent journalism powered by Codego Press.
