The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last week ordered money transfer platform Wise to pay nearly $2.5 million over alleged “illegal remittance practices,” including advertising inaccurate fees and failing to properly disclose exchange rates.

The bureau found the London-based fintech misled customers in the U.S. about its ATM fees and failed to refund remittance fees in the required timeframe after money customers sent did not arrive on time.

“By deceiving customers, Wise gave itself an unfair advantage over other competitors in the remittances market,” former CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said in a Jan. 30 statement. “New technology can help make money transfers cheaper and more convenient, but companies must be truthful and live up to longstanding law.”

The company must pay $450,000 in redress to harmed customers and $2.025 million as a civil money penalty, according to the CFPB order.

In February 2022, after a routine compliance examination by the CFPB, Wise found that “in limited cases, some US customers saw slightly incorrect fees,” a Wise spokesperson told Banking Dive. However, the firm voluntarily refunded $450,000 to those affected.

“While Wise strongly disagrees with the CFPB’s characterization of Wise’s conduct…we worked with the CFPB in good faith to conclude the matter and enable Wise to continue focusing on saving customers money,” the spokesperson added.

Since the order was announced last week, Chopra has been fired from his role and replaced by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent as the agency's acting director. Bessent has reportedly instructed staff to halt much of the bureau’s work, including ceasing to issue or approve proposed or final rules or guidelines, and halting the effective dates of all final rules that have not taken effect.

According to an internal email seen by NPR, CFPB employees were directed not to initiate or resolve enforcement actions or release any public communications, including research papers “to promote consistency with the goals of the Administration.”

The Wise spokesperson declined to comment on whether the recent CFPB leadership shakeup affected the penalty but said the matter had been closed.

“On January 30, 2025, Wise reached an agreement with the CFPB to bring the matter to a close,” the spokesperson said.

The CFPB did not respond to a request for comment.

Wise US, a wholly owned subsidiary of Wise PLC, is headquartered in New York and has over 3 million customers nationwide. The fintech allows customers to send, receive, and store remittances through a mobile app, prepaid accounts, and debit cards.

Between June 2020 and May 2021, the CFPB conducted a routine examination of Wise and highlighted certain issues within the company that it found inappropriate, according to the Wise spokesperson.

“In February 2022, the CFPB highlighted certain issues where Wise had inadvertently been operating in ways the Bureau deemed necessary to address,” the spokesperson said.

The issues were primarily technical, such as the ability to download certain materials as PDFs, updating wording choices like “amount we’ll convert” to “transfer amount,” displaying exchange rates rounded up to four decimal points instead of six, and having full disclaimer text available on the page rather than through a hyperlink, the spokesperson noted.

Wise has since cooperated with the CFPB to address all of the identified issues, resolving most of them by November 2022, the spokesperson noted.

However, the CFPB claims that Wise violated the Consumer Financial Protection Act of 2010 by misleading customers into believing they were entitled to lower ATM fees, free withdrawals and other customer perks, which they were not. Though Wise advertised lower ATM fees, it rarely applied to U.S. customers. Also, it promised two free withdrawals of more than $200 but limited them to $100 each, the bureau found.

The CFPB also alleged that Wise failed to properly disclose multiple fees, including credit card funding fees via Apple Pay or Google Pay, exchange rates, required refunds for delayed transfers and other mandatory disclosures.

In 2022, European regulators compelled Wise to devise a formal plan to rectify the issue of the lack of proof of address for several of its customers, the Financial Times reported.

Wise was recently involved in a data breach incident affecting its customers through Evolve Bank & Trust and has notified those impacted by the cybersecurity issue. The fintech ended its partnership with Evolve in 2023.