Turkey Has Struck Off 24 Payment Licences. 75 Are Left.

Turkey's Official Gazette of 23 September carried a single paragraph from the central bank. It cancelled the licence of Papel Elektronik Para ve Ödeme Hizmetleri A.Ş.

Papel is the fourteenth name on the central bank's list of electronic money institutions whose licence has been taken away. Fifty-five are still standing.

What the decision actually says

Decision 12092/21691, dated 18 September 2026, revokes the authorisation granted to Papel on 27 October 2022 by decision 11334/20933. It cites Article 16, first paragraph, items (ç) and (e), Article 19, and Article 21, eighth paragraph, of Law 6493, the statute governing payment and securities settlement systems, payment services and electronic money institutions.

That is the whole text. No reason is stated. Nothing is said about customer balances, a wind-down period, or where a user of the app should go next.

The register, not the paragraph, is the story

The central bank publishes two rosters, one for electronic money institutions and one for payment institutions, and each carries three lists: operating, licence cancelled, and ended by merger.

Counted on 29 September, there are 55 operating e-money institutions and 20 operating payment institutions. There are 14 cancelled e-money licences and 10 cancelled payment licences. Three more firms ended by merging into a competitor.

That is 102 companies the register has ever named, of which 24 had the licence taken away. Almost one in four.

The two registers do not overlap: no institution code and no company name appears on both. The strike rate is not even between them. Among e-money firms it is 14 of 70. Among payment institutions it is 10 of 32, close to a third.

What the survivors are allowed to do

The e-money table is more useful than a headcount, because it records which payment services under Article 12 of the law each firm may offer.

All 55 hold the first three: operating a payment account, transfers from it, and issuing or acquiring a payment instrument. All 55 may issue electronic money. After that the list thins. Forty-four may intermediate bill payments. Forty may do money remittance.

Nineteen hold the two open banking permissions, payment initiation and account information. Those two never appear apart — every firm with one has the other — so Turkey has 19 e-money institutions and 7 payment institutions licensed for open banking, 26 of 75 in total.

And one permission is almost unused. Item (d) covers a payment where the customer approves on a phone or similar device and the money goes to a telecoms or IT operator acting purely as intermediary. Three firms hold it. In the register they are named TT, Turkcell and Vodafone, which are the names of Turkey's three mobile operators. No payment institution holds it at all. Turkcell is the only company in the country with all nine permissions.

Why a payments team should read the letters

Five of the 20 payment institutions do not hold the account permissions at all. They are Global, Logo, MoneyGram Turkey, Tronapay and Western Union Turkey: remittance and billing businesses, not account providers.

That is the practical use of this register. For anyone choosing a Turkish partner, "are they licensed" is the wrong question. The letters decide the product. Without (ç) there is no remittance. Without (f) and (g) there is no open banking. And a register where a quarter of the names have been struck off is a different risk picture from a list of the living.

What this is not

The decision gives no reason, and HaiPay is not supplying one. Turkish press reports connect Papel to an investigation into the laundering of illegal betting and fraud proceeds; no official confirmation was found today and this article does not report it as fact.

Reports also describe an earlier decision of 22 January 2026 suspending some of Papel's activities. HaiPay searched the Official Gazette indices from 22 January to 3 February 2026 and found no Papel entry, so that step is unconfirmed here.

The cancellation lists carry no dates. "Fourteenth" is a position on the published list, not a verified chronology. The register is a roster: it reports no volumes, no customer numbers and no balances, and a permission describes what a firm may do, not what it does. All counts are HaiPay's, from the pages as read on 29 September 2026.

HaiPay did not contact the central bank, Papel or any listed institution.

What to watch

Whether the central bank says anything about customer funds. Safeguarding is in the rules; it is not in this decision.

Whether the cancelled column keeps growing faster than the operating one, which is the only way to tell licensing from clearing-out.

And whether the open banking cohort moves off 26. It has been the smaller half of this market since the permissions were added to the law in 2019.