To ASX questions, iSignthis tries vaudeville

The latest correspondence between the Australian Securities Exchange and suspended iSignthis – released on Monday – needs to be seen to be believed. Though that could be said about iSignthis full stop.

Remember, the ASX’s reasons for suspending iSignthis shares from trading back in October (as they remain) were made public on April 30 and strongly suggested that iSignthis had become an international money-laundering colony. This is something altogether new.

It comes down to when and why global payments giant Visa suspended the processing of its cards by iSignthis. The company had disclosed in its quarterly accounts lodged on April 29 that “processing to merchants across the Visa network was also suspended for parts of March pending response to Visa re: queries on ASX ‘investigation’, concerns re: ‘derogatory media’ and the focus on high risk merchants.”

But according to Visa’s own website, iSignthis' European operations had been suspended by Visa’s anti-money laundering division, and its PCI DSS certification – the global payment system’s anti-fraud security standard – had expired on March 31.

When presented with this evidence on Twitter on May 1, iSignthis’ chief executive John Karantzis tweeted that “we forgot to send our PCI DSS certificate by 30 March 2020” but that he was “fixing it”.

Which flatly contradicted another line in iSignthis’ April 29 disclosure, which said the company’s PCI DSS certification had been “successfully audited and submitted to the relevant scheme on time”.

Thus the ASX wrote to iSignthis on May 7 politely asking how it could reconcile the April 29 statement that its PCI DSS certification was “successfully audited and submitted to the relevant scheme on time” with Karantzis’ May 1 tweet that the PCI DSS certification was not submitted on time. The ASX also wondered how Visa could suspend iSignthis for "parts of March" over issues with renewing a certification that didn’t even expire until March 31. Great question! Though we’re still wondering what happened to Visa suspending iSignthis over derogatory media.

Karantzis wrote to the ASX on May 13, in the ASX’s words, “purporting to respond”.

On May 14, the ASX demanded a compliant response.

On May 20, Karantzis responded again, his letter to the ASX’s compliance team beginning “Your email is not acceptable”. This guy is the real deal!

Another highlight was “ASX would not be issuing a query letter to Westpac ...”. So was “Consequently, you have no power under Listing Rule 18.7…”. Karantzis spent one whole year (FTE) at law school and he’s lecturing the Australian market operator on the application of its own listing rules. His is cognitive dissonance at a level heretofore unseen.

Given one last chance by the bourse on May 21, Karantzis wrote again on May 25. That final correspondence, the ASX said, “avoids answering a number of direct queries and gives incomplete or confusing responses to a number of others”.

The ASX has now even cited iSignthis’ potential non-compliance with Listing Rule 12.5, that “an entity’s structure and operations must be appropriate for a listed entity”. You don’t need an honorary juris doctorate from NFI University to tell you that’s almost the end of the road.