ING to shut controversial payments unit Payvision

The Dutch bank ING Group plans to close Payvision, an international payment processor that is under investigation for processing hundreds of millions of dollars in payments that resulted from illegal investment schemes.

The $1.1 trillion-asset ING acquired the Netherlands-based payment company in 2018 for about $420 million. Payvision competes with Adyen, a Dutch payment processor that has boosted its international profile in recent years.

Payvision quickly became subject to a claim from the European Union cybercrime unit European Funds Recovery Initiative, which claimed Payvision had processed about $160 million in fraudulent transactions that predated the ING deal.

ING in 2020 additionally sold parts of Payvision that processed gambling and pornography payments. ING, which sold the gambling and pornography portion of Payveris for one euro, at the time said that those payment types were not illegal, but that the bank "applies its own" policy, according to a 2020 Reuters report. The Reuters report added the divestiture removed "high margin" customers and thus hurt Payvision's financial performance.

On its website, ING says it's phasing out Payvision by the second quarter of 2022. "After a thorough evaluation of all options in the context of the rapidly evolving and increasingly competitive and capital intensive e-commerce merchant market, ING has concluded that it is not feasible to achieve its ambitions with Payvision," it said.

The EFRI has called Payvision the "Wirecard of the Netherlands," a reference to the German payment processor that collapsed in 2020 following an accounting scandal that led to arrests of senior Wirecard officers, a divestiture of most of the company's units and political pressure on German regulators over the pace of their Wirecard investigation.