German regulator fines neobank Vivid Money over fee-disclosure and reporting lapses
BaFin issued a combined €26,000 fine after finding Vivid Money failed to properly report its account models to a national account-comparison service and left required fee information and a glossary temporarily unavailable on its website.
Germany's Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, known as BaFin, has imposed a combined fine of €26,000 on Vivid Money S.A., the Luxembourg-licensed neobank, over procedural failures tied to fee transparency and regulatory reporting rather than anti-money-laundering violations.
BaFin found that Vivid Money failed to properly report its account models to the regulator's national account-comparison service, a tool German consumers can use to compare bank account fees across providers. The regulator also found that the company neglected internal processes that resulted in required fee information and a mandatory fee glossary being temporarily unavailable on its website, in breach of German payment-account transparency rules.
The fine became legally binding on August 26, 2026. At €26,000, the penalty is modest in scale compared with the larger anti-money-laundering fines BaFin and other European regulators have levied against fintechs in recent years, reflecting the fact that this action centered on disclosure and reporting infrastructure rather than transaction-monitoring or customer-due-diligence failures.
Vivid Money, which offers retail banking, savings and investment products across several European markets under a Luxembourg banking license, has previously drawn regulatory attention in Germany over other compliance matters. BaFin did not disclose whether Vivid Money has since corrected the reporting and website gaps identified in its findings.