Turkey's Financial Safety Net: How TMSF Is Protecting Millions of Fintech Customers

Count the accounts. Papara, taken into administration in January. Ozan, in September. IQ Money, Paybull, PayGo, Birleşik Ödeme, and most recently FastPay, all brought under TMSF management between May 2025 and February 2026. Together, these seven entities hold active electronic money licences covering more than 22 million user accounts. When TMSF assumed control of each platform, the agency faced a question that no Turkish institution had confronted at this scale: how do you keep a live digital payments ecosystem running while its management is replaced, its books are audited, and its regulatory status is resolved? The answer, based on the evidence of the past nine months, is that you do it by treating operational continuity as the non-negotiable priority. Not one of the seven platforms experienced a service outage. Merchant settlement cycles continued. Payroll integrations kept functioning. Users accessed their funds without interruption. For 22 million account holders, the transition was largely invisible, which is exactly how a financial safety net is supposed to work.

The structural achievement is significant. TMSF was originally designed to manage bank failures: freeze assets, audit books, liquidate or sell. Digital payments platforms demanded a fundamentally different approach, and the agency adapted. Within weeks of the first fintech seizure, TMSF established a dedicated digital financial services unit staffed with technologists, payments specialists, and operational managers drawn from the private sector. Trustees appointed to each platform were given explicit mandates to maintain service levels while conducting forensic reviews. The model has clear parallels with the FDIC's approach to bank receiverships in the United States, where the primary statutory objective is continuity of insured deposit access, not rapid liquidation. The FDIC has managed over 560 bank failures since 2000, and its playbook prioritises keeping the lights on for depositors above all else. TMSF has effectively built the Turkish equivalent for the digital payments era, compressing a decade of institutional learning into nine months of operational execution.

The question of what comes next (whether these entities are sold to qualified private buyers, merged, or restructured) is legitimately open, and TMSF has indicated that resolution strategies are being developed on a case-by-case basis. That is appropriate. The FDIC typically takes twelve to twenty-four months to resolve a mid-size bank receivership; the complexity of fintech platforms with millions of active users and integration dependencies across merchant networks makes hasty disposal riskier than careful management. What is already clear is the counterfactual: without TMSF's intervention, the collapse of seven licensed e-money providers would have left 22 million users scrambling to recover funds through court proceedings that could take years. Merchants would have lost settlement flows. Payroll systems would have broken. The economic disruption, concentrated among younger, digitally native users who disproportionately rely on e-money platforms, would have been severe. Instead, the system held. TMSF's expansion into fintech administration was not planned in advance, but the institutional capacity to execute it was built over two decades of managing financial institution failures. Turkey's financial safety net was tested at digital scale, and it passed.