Germany didn’t lose its fintech edge after Wirecard — it lost its innocence. Unzer’s story shows how a market built on speed and confidence is learning the harder, slower language of resilience.
The optimism that built a scene — and the shock that reset it
In the mid-2010s, Germany’s fintech scene was finally matching its global reputation for engineering precision with digital daring. Wirecard symbolized that new era — not a startup fantasy, but a real payments empire with scale, data, and market share across Europe and Asia.
Then came June 2020. Auditors announced €1.9 billion missing. Overnight, Germany’s fintech pride turned into one of its biggest corporate scandals. What followed wasn’t just a bankruptcy — it was a system reset. Regulators toughened, investors lost their appetite for unchecked growth, and every fintech in the country inherited a new mandate: prove you’re clean, not just fast.
Unzer’s arc — from local rails to European contender
Founded in 2003 as Heidelpay, Unzer built its reputation quietly: dependable rails for e-commerce merchants and solid relationships with banks. When KKR took a majority stake in 2019, Heidelberg’s homegrown PSP suddenly had global ambitions.
In 2020 came the Unzer rebrand — sleek, confident, built for scale. The company began acquiring smaller PSPs across the DACH region and Scandinavia, chasing Adyen-level growth. Within a year, Unzer handled billions in payments, expanded its team, and — like everyone else in the industry — hired top talent wherever it found it.
After Wirecard’s collapse, that talent pool included a large number of experienced specialists — risk managers, acquiring experts, data engineers — who had helped build real infrastructure and merchant networks at Wirecard. They brought valuable expertise the market needed, and Unzer became one of the few places in Germany able to absorb it.
But integration came with a challenge: how to blend the high-velocity culture of a former market leader with a post-Wirecard world now defined by regulation and restraint.
The audit, the pressure — and the reckoning
BaFin, still rebuilding its own credibility, wasn’t about to take chances. In 2021 the regulator ordered a special audit of Unzer’s anti-money-laundering controls. A fine followed, along with restrictions on new onboarding.
According to company statements, Unzer cooperated fully and began tightening its compliance and risk governance across entities. New leadership joined from banking, and the firm invested heavily in monitoring and AML infrastructure.
Still, recovery takes time — and the next blow hit harder.
On 7 November 2025, Unzer’s founder Mirko Hüllemann was arrested in Spain amid a multi-country investigation into large-scale credit-card fraud. Authorities alleged that criminal networks had routed small recurring payments through weakly supervised PSPs worldwide. The presumption of innocence stands, but the message to the industry was unmistakable: in 2025, regulators don’t wait for disasters — they intercept them.
Talent meets oversight — a market grows up
The movement of former Wirecard professionals into Unzer wasn’t a replay of the past — it was an evolution. Many of these experts carried essential skills that the market could not afford to lose: deep merchant-acquiring knowledge, card-scheme discipline, and operational muscle built at continental scale.
Unzer’s real test was alignment — merging that experience with a new compliance-first environment. The company began building standardized onboarding frameworks, live transaction monitoring, and unified data visibility across subsidiaries. What emerged wasn’t a slowdown, but a new phase of professionalized scale: growth governed by precision, not by instinct.
DORA — Europe’s new operating system for trust
As Unzer worked to rebuild confidence, Europe quietly introduced a new rulebook: the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA). Coming into force across the EU, it demands proof — not promises — of stability.
DORA forces financial and fintech institutions to:
- Map all third-party tech dependencies (cloud, data, processors) and show backup plans.
- Run real resilience testing, from cyber-attacks to system failures, with board accountability.
- Share threat intelligence across industries to prevent isolated blind spots.
- Allow direct oversight of “critical ICT providers,” extending regulation beyond financial entities.
In short, DORA transforms trust into something measurable. It is the legislative antidote to both overconfidence and opacity — the two viruses that once fueled Wirecard’s rise.
The bigger picture — and what it means now
For Germany’s fintech landscape, these years mark the transition from startup excitement to industrial maturity.
Fintechs no longer sell speed; they sell resilience. Investors now ask about governance before gross margins. Compliance officers are no longer side characters — they’re product architects.
Unzer, still serving thousands of merchants, embodies this pivot: from a challenger racing for scale to an operator proving its staying power. Its journey — like Germany’s — is about evolving, not retreating.
👉 Market takeaway: The next wave of German fintech leaders won’t be defined by how quickly they launch, but by how well they endure.