A 10-minute walk from the Bank of England, on the eastern edge of the City of London, lies a gateway to a new shadow world of money.
Here on Dukes Place is the office of Moorwand Ltd., one of a fast-growing breed of upstarts that bill themselves as alternatives to old-fashioned banks when moving money around the world. Each day in the U.K. alone, an estimated ?1.4 billion (?220 billion) courses through loosely regulated digital payments businesses like Moorwand. Though only a small fraction of Britain¡¯s financial flows, it¡¯s a system that critics warn is opening a door for dirty money.
Moorwand is one of more than 200 electronic money institutions, or EMIs, approved by U.K. regulators since 2018. Trouble soon followed: A tiny lender in Denmark with which Moorwand had developed a close relationship flagged hundreds of suspicious transactions involving the payments firm, according to internal bank documents. In 2018, Danish authorities seized the bank, Kobenhavns Andelskasse, citing violations of money-laundering laws and referred the matter to the police.
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