Last year SoftBank agreed to make a €900mn investment into Wirecard; as part of the deal they were going to facilitate introductions for potential partners; some of those partners are now backing away from the payments fintech after seeing the news in recent weeks; some deals were still in the early phase and can be scrapped pretty quickly, others are a bit more complicated; this trend also goes for fintechs like Klarna who is in dialogue with a unit of Wirecard; Klarna tells the FT, “the unit housing its partnership appears legitimate but of course that is subject to review and the future is unknown with the insolvency filing.”; the Wirecard saga has had wide reaching ramifications due to the nature of their business and the web of partnerships they built; “As a European and someone who works in the payments industry, what seems to have happened at and around Wirecard is very disturbing,” wrote Patrick Collison, CEO of the US payments startup Stripe, according to the FT. Financial Times.
