EML Payments’ trouble-plagued Irish subsidiary, PFS Card Services Ireland Ltd, has gone into liquidation after a strategic review of the business concluded that it was “no longer commercially viable or sustainable”. Announcing the decision last week, the EML board said its aim was to wind down the business in a professional and orderly manner. It said challenges facing the business included ongoing delays in the completion of regulatory remediation work, deteriorating trading performance, sustained losses and cash burn, and difficulty attracting staff. PFS Group, which includes Irish and United Kingdom businesses, was acquired in 2020 for £226 million upfront and £55 million on an earn-out basis.  It is a provider of white label payments and banking-as-a-service technology, whose customers at the time included financial institutions, non-financial corporates, fintechs and public sector organisations in 24 countries. EML said the acquisition would add digital banking and multi-currency offerings to its product suite. The Irish part of the business, PFS Card Services Ireland Ltd, has been the subject of regulatory intervention since May 2021, when the Central Bank of Ireland reported that it was exposed to elevated risk of money laundering and terrorism financing as a result of the poor quality of its risk management framework and governance. That intervention is ongoing and has included restrictions on business growth. The UK subsidiary, Prepaid Financial Services Ltd, has also had problems with its regulator. The UK Financial Conduct Authority ordered it to cease onboarding new customers, agents and distributors following concerns in relation to the company’s risk and control frameworks and governance. That order remains in place. EML’s 2022/23 financial report included a $193.7 million impairment in relation PFS Group. That charge and other impairments were the main contributors to EML’s loss of $284.8 million in the year to June. Substantial cash burn in the PFS business was a big factor in EML reporting negative cash flow of $2.6 million. EML said last week that its remaining cash exposure to PFS Card Services Ireland Ltd is around $20 million of intercompany balances owed by EML Group to PFS Card Services. In addition, a one-off impairment charge of around $25 million arising from the liquidation will be recognised in the group’s 2023/24 financial statement. The charge represents the removal of net assets of the PFS Card Services business and any associated intangibles. The UK business is not affected by the liquidation and is being separated from the Irish business. EML chair Luke Bortoli said a broader strategic review of the group business was ongoing. In November, the company disclosed that it was in discussions to sell its subsidiary Sentenial Ltd, which has not performed up to expectations since it was acquired in 2021. Sentenial provides real-time payment services to UK and European banks. It also has a subsidiary Nuapay that operates in the open banking market. At the time of the acquisition, EML said it would add non-card and non-scheme payment products to its offering. In its 2022/23 accounts, just two years after acquiring Sentenial for $109 million, EML included a $69.2 million impairment in relation to the acquisition. The