ePayments

ePayments was a UK-authorised electronic money institution, widely used by freelancers and traders because it combined multi-currency accounts with a prepaid card and reached countries where mainstream providers did not. It appeared in a large number of broker cashiers.

What happened

In February 2020 the Financial Conduct Authority required ePayments to suspend all activity after a review identified weaknesses in its anti-money-laundering controls. Customer accounts were frozen — not for days, but for an extended period while the firm worked through remediation and identity checks. The business ultimately did not resume normal operation and moved to a wind-down, returning verified customers' balances over a lengthy process.

The method is therefore not slow, restricted or regional. It is gone. A broker page that still lists it has not been maintained.

What it is worth taking from this

The episode is the clearest available illustration of a risk traders routinely ignore: money sitting in a payment wallet is exposed to that wallet's regulator, not to your broker's. Client money at a regulated broker is held in segregated accounts and, in the UK, covered by the FSCS up to a statutory limit. A balance in an e-money wallet is neither segregated in the same way nor covered by a compensation scheme, and a regulatory intervention can freeze it overnight with no appeal available to the account holder.

• Move money through wallets; do not store it in them.
• Keep a second verified withdrawal route — verification is impossible once an account is frozen.
• Take an unmaintained cashier as evidence about the broker. If it still advertises a provider that closed years ago, ask what else on the site is out of date.

If a broker offers it today

It cannot complete a payment. Choose another method from the live cashier, and if support insists otherwise, treat that as a reason to look harder at the firm.