Yellow Card gains Swiss AML approval for institutional stablecoin

Yellow Card announced on June 24, 2026, that its wholly owned Lugano subsidiary has secured affiliation under Switzerland’s Anti-Money Laundering Act and will operate as a supervised financial intermediary.

The Swiss affiliation requires the Lugano company to carry out know-your-customer checks, customer due diligence, transaction monitoring, compliance with the Travel Rule and routine reporting. Those obligations align the subsidiary with other supervised Swiss financial intermediaries.

Yellow Card says the structure provides banks, payment firms and corporate clients in Europe a single regulated counterparty to move capital into more than 50 emerging markets in Africa, Latin America and elsewhere using its stablecoin infrastructure.

The Swiss arm will act as the regulated gateway to Yellow Card’s stablecoin rails, wallet services, fiat settlement options and local stablecoin issuance across the firm’s network. Institutional partnerships with Visa and Mastercard and integrations with payment providers including Western Union, Thunes and MoneyGram support availability of those services to European counterparties.

Craig Stoehr, general counsel, called the compliance framework ‘a foundation rather than a formality’ and said the Swiss subsidiary was established to meet Swiss regulatory standards from the outset.

Chris Maurice, CEO and co-founder, described the new entity as providing institutional clients ‘a regulated supervised counterparty for accessing our global stablecoin infrastructure across the US, Africa, LatAm, and other emerging markets.’

Olpha Bribech, a French lawyer and member of Yellow Card’s senior management team, will lead the Swiss subsidiary and run the company’s permanent local presence in Ticino. The firm located the subsidiary in Lugano, where a local community of developers and financial firms works on digital assets.

Yellow Card said the Swiss affiliation adds to a regulatory portfolio built over eight years of African operations. The company reports more than $6 billion in processed volume across 35-plus African countries and holds licenses that include what it describes as the first VASP license issued in Africa (Botswana), multiple money transmitter authorizations and a Third Party Payment Provider license in South Africa with Standard Bank as sponsor.

The affiliation follows Yellow Card’s decision seven months earlier to end retail trading and focus on B2B institutional infrastructure. Company executives say the Swiss regulated counterparty simplifies onboarding and compliance for institutional clients by removing the need to negotiate separate compliance relationships in each jurisdiction.

Yellow Card said the Swiss subsidiary will operate under national AML law and be subject to oversight comparable to other supervised Swiss financial intermediaries, and that European institutions can use the Swiss entity as a single compliance point when accessing the firm’s emerging-market stablecoin network.