Markus Braun at Wirecard’s annual meeting a year ago in Munich.
Photo: Peter Kneffel/picture alliance/Getty ImagesMarkus Braun was the self-styled visionary behind German payments giant Wirecard AG .
An instantly recognizable fixture at tech conferences, recently adopting Steve Jobs-style black turtlenecks, Mr. Braun became known for grand predictions about the future of payments, big data and artificial intelligence.
His resignation Friday after Wirecard said its auditors couldn’t locate €1.9 billion ($2.1 billion) of the company’s cash raises serious questions about his legacy. Long the company’s face and most passionate advocate, as well as its largest shareholder, Mr. Braun said Friday that “responsibility for all business transactions lies” with the chief executive.
A tall 50-year-old computer scientist from Vienna with an intense manner of speaking, Mr. Braun had been Wirecard’s CEO and chief technology officer since 2002. He was educated at the University of Vienna and previously worked for KPMG LLP’s consulting business.
A former Wirecard employee said Mr. Braun made a formidable double act with the company’s chief operating officer, Jan Marsalek, who was suspended Thursday.
“Markus was the one who spoke to investors, he was the storyteller,” the employee said. “Jan went around the world doing deals.” Others say Mr. Braun lived a quiet, unflashy life in the suburbs of Munich, where Wirecard is based.
He controlled around 7% of the company’s shares, according to FactSet, which were worth $1 billion until earlier this week. With the stock cratering over the past two days, those shares are now worth around $200 million.
“The confidence of the capital market in the company I have been managing for 18 years has been deeply shaken,” Mr. Braun said in a statement.
Mr. Braun presided over Wirecard as it grew into one of Europe’s highest-profile fintech companies. It processes electronic payments for retailers and others and provides related services and loans, and has high exposure to rapid growth in Asian markets.
He would evangelize for the company’s products, hitting on the point that different from its rivals Wirecard offered a single interface to the company’s payments platform. He was proud that Wirecard was a rare European tech success, but also saw it as a global force. “We’re active on all five continents,” he said in a 2019 company video.
Mr. Braun attracted an ardent bunch of detractors who said the company’s uncanny consistency in growing its sales from year to year was too perfect to be true. When the Financial Times published a series of stories on the company’s accounting, Mr. Braun was the chief rebutter, dismissing the allegations and assuring investors the scrutiny would soon be over.
Wirecard initially called the reporting “inaccurate, misleading and defamatory,” although it acknowledged in subsequent days that an internal investigation had been commissioned.
In November, after agreeing to have KPMG conduct an outside audit of the firm, Mr. Braun told investors that nothing would be found. “We can totally confirm today that all of these allegations are unfounded.”
Activist investor Christopher Hohn, who bet the company’s shares would fall, tried to get Mr. Braun fired in April after the audit looking into the company’s accounting practices couldn’t get answers to certain questions.
Mr. Hohn said in an interview Friday that his team had met with Mr. Braun in Germany earlier this year, and that Mr. Braun couldn’t satisfactorily answer questions raised by allegations of fraud at the company.
A tweet posted to Mr. Braun’s Twitter account Friday said the company has “excellent employees, a strong business model, outstanding technology and abundant resources to ensure a great future.”
Write to Paul J. Davies at paul.davies@wsj.com and Julie Steinberg at julie.steinberg@wsj.com
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