Wise Gets Bounced—Now It's Trying the GENIUS Act Route

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said no to Wise this week. Not a soft pass, either. They cited deficiencies in anti-money laundering and counterterrorism financing programmes. The London fintech had wanted a de novo national trust bank charter. Now it doesn't have one.

But Wise isn't packing it in. Instead, it's pivoting to a different regulatory path altogether: the GENIUS Act framework.

The irony is thick. Over the past eighteen months, the OCC has conditionally approved national trust charters for Ripple, BitGo, Paxos, Circle, and Fidelity Digital Assets. In May 2026, it cleared Nomura's Laser Digital. Crypto.com got a federal custodian bank licence in February. Coinbase secured a national trust company charter in April. More than two dozen charters approved this year. Wise? Rejected. The OCC's first public denial of a fintech charter application in this cycle. That stings.

The rejection wasn't random. Back in July 2025, Wise copped a Multi-State Consent Order over compliance failures. The company was slow filing suspicious activity reports. Other AML gaps too. Wise US ponied up $4.2 million and committed to boosting its compliance infrastructure. Then, just days later, it filed for the OCC charter anyway. Timing, as they say.

The GENIUS Act itself is barely older than the dust on Wise's rejection. Enacted July 18, 2025, it establishes a regulatory framework specifically for payment stablecoin activities. New pathways, federal supervision, the works. It takes effect on the earlier of 18 January 2027 or 120 days after the primary regulators issue final regulations. So Wise is essentially gambling that this narrower, stablecoin-focused route will sidestep the AML scrutiny that torched the traditional charter.

Whether that gamble pays off is another question entirely. The GENIUS framework is tailored for stablecoin issuers, not fintech payment platforms per se. Wise's operation extends well beyond that. But the company clearly reckons a regulatory pathway designed from the ground up for payment stablecoins might offer the breathing room the traditional charter process wouldn't.

What's notable is the OCC's message here. Even as it opens the federal banking system to crypto-focused entrants at scale, it's willing to say no when a compliance record stinks. Wise's denial proves the agency isn't just rubber-stamping applications. They're still applying teeth.

Operationally, Wise isn't sweating. The company continues operating across the U.S. under money transmitter licences in 48 states and four territories. Its global portfolio runs to more than 80 licences. A federal charter would've been a feather in the cap, but it's not a death sentence without one.

Still, the symbolism matters. Wise wanted to look federally supervised and domesticated. Instead it got publicly rejected in front of all the competitors who didn't. Now it's betting on an entirely new regulatory construct to fix a compliance problem the old one exposed. If the GENIUS Act approval doesn't materialize, Wise's next move gets a lot harder to explain.

Source & further reading:

• Wise expected to resubmit US charter application under GENIUS — Cointelegraph
• North Korea arrests hackers accused of laundering stolen funds from country's bank via crypto — CoinDesk
• Democratizing weather derivatives through tokenization could be crypto's most important real-world use case — CoinDesk
• Robinhood Chain's real-world assets jump fivefold as tokenized stocks start trading in bigger size — CoinDesk
• Senate Dems should accept the victory they won on Trump's crypto limits: White House — CoinDesk