Shares in Wise fell about 10% on Friday after the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency declined the money-transfer firm’s application for a national trust bank charter, the licence that would have wired it directly into the Federal Reserve’s payment systems.

The London-headquartered fintech, which listed on Nasdaq in May, had spent more than a year chasing the approval.

The rejection shuts off, for now, the most ambitious part of Wise’s American strategy. A national trust charter would have let it settle dollar payments directly with the Fed rather than routing them through partner banks, the sort of infrastructure prize that rivals such as Klarna have also pursued in the US.

Wise applied to the OCC in June 2025 to set up Wise National Trust, a non-depository bank based in Austin, Texas.

The plan, as the company laid out, was to pair the charter with a master account at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and clear US dollars directly, including through real-time rails like FedNow.

Such a combination is rare. An OCC charter only makes a firm eligible to apply for a Fed account, and the central bank puts uninsured trust banks through its strictest review, a process that can run well past two years and that few applicants survive.

The tightest tier of applicants has waited on average around 823 days for a decision, and only one crypto-linked firm has so far cleared the bar.

Held together, the charter and master account would have done more than speed up settlement. Wise could have custodied its own dollar assets rather than leaning on third-party banks and, over time, shed some of the patchwork of state money transmitter licences that fintechs operating nationwide have to maintain.

The regulator did not publish a detailed rationale, though Law360 reported the OCC cited compliance gaps.

In its own statement, Wise pointed to “historical issues” with its original application and a shifting backdrop, noting the Fed had been “generally pausing account access for an uninsured trust bank.” The approach it had taken, the company said, had become “non-viable.”

Wise had also been carrying a multi-state consent order from July 2025, an enforcement settlement over compliance shortcomings that shadowed the bid.

The firm said it continues to work with the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority and the National Bank of Belgium on its risk and compliance systems.

The setback is narrower than the share move implied. Wise stressed that its day-to-day operations are unaffected, running in the US under money transmitter licences across 48 states and four territories, part of a portfolio of more than 80 licences worldwide.

Rather than abandon the effort, the company plans to try again under different rules. It intends to file a fresh application for a national trust charter under the framework created by the GENIUS Act, the recent US law governing stablecoins and other digital assets, according to Reuters.

The US remains the centre of Wise’s growth story. Chair David Wells has called it “the biggest market opportunity for our products in the world today,” and the country accounts for close to half of the group’s cross-border volume, which reached $243bn in its 2026 financial year, up 31% on the year before.

Direct Fed access would have brought Wise into line with the connections it already holds in the UK, the EU, Singapore, and Australia, cutting out intermediary banks and the costs that come with them. That is the pitch the OCC has now paused.

Wise is far from the only European fintech to treat a US charter as the gateway to scale, and the licences have become coveted milestones on both sides of the Atlantic.

Revolut spent years securing its own UK banking licence, a reminder that even at home these approvals rarely come quickly.

For a company built on stripping middlemen out of cross-border transfers, being told to keep pushing its dollars through other people’s banks is an awkward outcome.

Not every fintech has found America hospitable, either: Monzo walked away from the market last year. Wise, for its part, is staying, and reapplying.

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