Two back-to-back rejections of European fintech US bank charter applications by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) have sharpened the question of whether the US market is as open as many firms assumed. The denials, targeting Wise and Bunq within a fortnight of each other, expose the regulatory depth charge buried beneath the Wall Street dream.
Why European Fintech US Bank Charter Bids Keep Failing
The OCC issued Corporate Decision #1381 on 21 July 2026, blocking Wise’s proposed Wise National Trust, which would have been based in Austin, Texas, focused on trust and fiduciary operations. The regulator cited ‘significant supervisory and compliance concerns’ over Wise’s anti-money laundering controls. Those concerns were not new: a multistate consent order relating to deficiencies in Wise’s AML/CFT programme had already been issued in July 2025, according to PYMNTS. The OCC also found Wise’s organisers had failed to select directors with sufficient AML experience.
Wise’s share price fell approximately 10% after the decision, according to Startup Fortune. William Blair analyst Cristopher Kennedy noted that roughly one-third of Wise’s workforce is already focused on financial crime prevention, per Banking Dive. Wise said it intends to file again under a GENIUS Act framework, stating that its ‘business and compliance maturity have evolved significantly’ since the original submission, according to American Banker. American Banker also reported this was the OCC’s first public fintech denial during the current influx of charter applications in the Trump administration, following approximately a dozen approvals.
Bunq’s rejection came via Corporate Decision #1384, dated 4 August 2026. The proposed entity, bunq US Bank, N.A., would have been headquartered in New York. The OCC found the application presented significant supervisory and compliance concerns, ruled the proposed bank inadequately capitalised, and called its path to profitability ‘unrealistic’. The regulator also took a dim view of chief executive Ali Niknam’s plan to manage the US business part-time.
The OCC’s concern over profitability had grounding. Although Bunq began commercial operations in 2015, it did not record a full year of profit until fiscal year 2023, a result the regulator linked largely to European Central Bank rate increases. When rates declined in 2024 and 2025, Bunq’s profits fell with them. Reuters reported that Bunq had reapplied in January 2026 after withdrawing an earlier application at the start of 2024, and had secured a FINRA-approved broker-dealer licence in 2025 to offer investment products in the US. Bunq says it will try again.
The rejections land against a backdrop of broad industry enthusiasm. In a short window, PayPal, Nubank, Coinbase, Revolut and Bunq all registered interest in US charters. The Trump administration’s deregulatory signals, including raising the asset threshold for tougher prudential standards, stoked that interest.
But the architecture of US banking works against swift entry. Without a national charter, firms must navigate 50 separate state licences and compliance regimes. Revolut abandoned a state-level attempt in 2023 after years of friction with California’s regulator and later applied at the federal level. Monzo withdrew its own US banking application in October 2021 and has since stopped operations in the country. Zilch, meanwhile, confirmed it had ‘curtailed’ its US operations in its 2024 accounts, after building a waitlist of over 150,000 Americans for its buy now, pay later product in 2022. Monzo’s TS Anil had counselled Zilch’s founder to focus closer to home, a conversation that ultimately shaped that decision.
UK Bank Profits Draw Fresh Scrutiny
Britain’s four largest banks (NatWest, HSBC, Lloyds and Barclays) posted £29.2bn in combined profit for the first half of the year. Of that, £13.7bn was returned to shareholders via dividends and buybacks.
NatWest’s first-half profit came in at approximately £4.3bn, up 20% from £3.6bn a year earlier and ahead of analyst forecasts of £4bn, according to Global Banking & Finance. NatWest lifted its full-year return on tangible equity guidance to above 19%, from prior guidance of above 17%.
Shore Capital equity analyst Gary Greenwood said investors and some management teams ‘are becoming too comfortable extrapolating current conditions indefinitely’. ‘It is difficult to look at numbers such as these and conclude that banks are not currently overearning,’ he added. Shore Capital puts Lloyds’ retail unit’s RoTE at 32% for the first half, with NatWest at 27%. Greenwood’s central concern is whether these returns are structural or cyclical: ‘Investors risk mistaking cyclical tailwinds for structural change.’
Buyback activity is running at scale. According to AJ Bell, Lloyds is mid-way through a £1.75bn buyback, NatWest is returning £750m, and Barclays has already deployed a £1.5bn programme in 2026 as part of a commitment to return more than £15bn to shareholders between 2026 and 2028.
Lloyds is not expecting the Bank of England to cut rates from 3.75% until late 2027, a path shaped by oil-price pressures and persistent inflation. That rate forecast underpins the income upgrades across the sector, and it is precisely this windfall that left-wing MPs and lobbying groups are citing in calls for a fresh bank levy. Whether the OCC’s hard line on US fintech entrants proves similarly durable will depend on whether Wise and Bunq can address the regulator’s specific concerns before the political appetite for deregulation fades.
