Why Revolut should sift for gold through the smoking ruins of Wirecard

Wirecard may feel like a faraway tale of a crooked German firm but it's more local than you'd think.

For starters, "Europe's Enron" comes just as the region is plotting to take control over increasing amounts of regulated business from the City, post-Brexit.

Many continental financial firms and their clients have been sceptical about the capabilities of their local regulators and banks to run the big wholesale banking work that London has been doing for the EU over many decades.

This howler of a scandal will do nothing to ease their concerns.

Blame the auditors all you like (they deserve it), but regulators supposedly overseeing the German company have abjectly failed.

Even as allegations of major wrongdoing swirled last year, German banking regulator Bafin appointed only one person to scrutinise the giant firm.

It heaps shame and humiliation on Germany that it took an English newspaper, the Financial Times, to expose the scandal.

Expect the financial power-drift from the City to Frankfurt to be less hasty now, and a newly-confident Amsterdam to take over more of Germany’s financial regulatory work.

Wirecard is a UK story, too, because more than 1.5 million British citizens and merchants have now found themselves unable to make transactions and in some cases, access their money thanks to Wirecard’s implosion.

Fintech firms like Curve used Wirecard exclusively to make their transfers, as did stock market quoted Morses Club. Morses today admitted that its U Account customers have now had their funds frozen.

Quite why they hadn't switched earlier is a question they have to answer their angry customers. Perhaps they weren't reading the FT this past 18 months.

Wirecard’s collapse creates opportunities as well as headaches. Rival payment processors are gleefully onboarding Wirecard’s stranded clients and charging a premium, no doubt.