...
Good point, but why wouldn't Visa and Wavecrest just come to some agreement (asked rhetorically)? They've arguably both lost millions in revenue over some rule breach. Why wouldn't they just fix whatever it was? ...
From my point of view it looks like the breach of rules was solely on the end of WaveCrest.
VISA therefore terminated their business relationship with them. Why would they want to continue
to work with a company that has violated their contractual agreements?
I think the whole situation is somehow related to the recent tightening of the Anti money laundering
regulations of the EU (e.g. one of the changes was another decrease of the lifetime withdrawal
limits for unverified debit cards). The timing of the announcement of the new rules and the shutdown
of the debit cards that were issued by WaveCrest is too suspicious to be coincidental.
Maybe, but Visa cut off Wavecrest cards outside the Eurozone months before it acted there. That was the initial puzzle for me. I lost access to my Wavecrest-based cards months before Europeans did, so the puzzle was "what was so special about the Eurozone that it could continue using Wavecrest cards when Canada could not?". At the time there was no explanation offered - none at all. When the Eurozone cards got the axe from Visa some months later, the reason given was that they had "broken a rule", but I've seen no explanation beyond that. Companies and governments break each others' rules all the time, but when large amounts of money are at stake they usually come to some accommodation. For example, when a large bank was caught money laundering, the accommodation was a fine rather than a loss of licence: