Türkiye's central bank revokes a payment institution's licence
The licence of TRPOS Ödeme Kuruluşu A.Ş. to operate as a payment institution was revoked by a decision of the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye, published in the Official Gazette dated September 9, 2026, issue 33365. The notice runs to a single paragraph and states no reason. It was published one day after the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor's Office announced an investigation into the company.
A single paragraph notice in the Official Gazette
The decision was published in the notices section of the Official Gazette dated Wednesday, September 9, 2026, issue 33365, under the heading of the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye. The formal title of the notice is the Decision on the Revocation of the Operating Licence of TRPOS Ödeme Kuruluşu A.Ş. According to the text, the central bank decision is numbered 12084/21683 and dated 8/9/2026, meaning it was taken one day before publication. The company had received its payment institution licence through a central bank decision dated 29/9/2023 and numbered 11506/21105. The revocation rests on subparagraph (c) of the first paragraph of article 16 of Law number 6493 on Payment and Securities Settlement Systems, Payment Services and Electronic Money Institutions, dated 20/6/2013. One point deserves emphasis: the published text is a single paragraph and contains no explanation of the reason for the revocation. Anadolu Agency and CNN Türk reported the decision the same day.
An investigation announced a day earlier and a trustee appointed
One day before the revocation, on September 8, 2026, the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor's Office announced an investigation into the same company. It is being conducted by the bureau for financing of terrorism and laundering of proceeds of crime, and covers laundering of assets derived from crime along with breaches of Law number 7258 on the regulation of betting and games of chance in football and other sports competitions. According to press reports, the operation took place in four provinces centred on Istanbul, listed by Milliyet as Istanbul, Adana, Mersin and Tekirdağ. Proceedings were opened against 27 people including company executives, and 24 suspects were taken into custody. Within the investigation 245 bank and crypto accounts were blocked and 57 assets were seized: 18 residences, 14 vehicles, 16 fields or vineyards, 7 plots and 2 business premises, with an approximate market value reported at 247 million Turkish lira. The company was found to have reached a combined transaction volume of 3.1 billion Turkish lira across 2024 and 2025. By decision of the Istanbul on-duty criminal judgeship of peace, the Savings Deposit Insurance Fund was appointed as trustee to the company's management. The legal position needs stating plainly: the sources contain no conviction, the people named are suspects, and the notice draws no official link between the two developments.
The story is not one company, it is the fragility of the collection channel
What separates this from sector gossip is what the company actually did. The TRPOS business model was providing merchants with physical POS terminals, virtual POS and payment link infrastructure. So the affected side is small and medium sized businesses and online stores directly. According to prosecutors, some merchant accounts served by the company were used for illegal betting transactions and funds were moved to other accounts. The picture that emerges is this: a payment institution's licence can be revoked overnight, and businesses running on that infrastructure can lose their collection channel without warning. The questions the sources leave unanswered sit exactly where businesses care most: no effective date for the revocation, no liquidation timetable and no transition period were stated, and nothing was published about what happens to pending balances, receivables and withdrawals held at the institution. The uncertainty is real and, for now, unresolved.
Four practical conclusions for businesses in Türkiye
First, redundancy. Depending on a single payment provider is a single point of failure in the technical sense; a second virtual POS agreement or a backup provider contract is the only thing that keeps sales alive through an interruption like this. The cost is usually lower than one day of lost revenue. Second, a verification habit. The licence status of the payment institution you work with is not static; checking it periodically against the list of authorised institutions published by the central bank is more useful than looking once at signing. Third, balance discipline. Moving amounts held at the payment institution to a bank account on a short cycle directly reduces exposure in this kind of interruption, and in this case nothing at all was published about the fate of pending balances. Fourth, provider selection. The claim at the core of the investigation was that legitimate looking merchant accounts were used for illegal traffic. Working with a provider whose merchant onboarding checks are loose carries not only interruption risk but account freezing and reputational risk. These are not a recommendation list, they are operational notes drawn from facts in the sources; no official body has issued guidance for affected businesses.
The UNALSOFT view
For us the meaning of this story is that payment infrastructure is the least considered and most critical dependency in most businesses. In the e-commerce systems we build we take care not to lock payments to a single provider and to structure provider changes so they take hours rather than days, because a payment outage renders every other improvement meaningless. Our advice to businesses in Türkiye is plain: check your provider's licence status and your backup plan this week. Such a check costs an hour, while its absence can cost the whole season.
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