Payward, Inc., the unified financial infrastructure group that operates Kraken and a portfolio of trading and asset-management products, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Saldo Finance Oy, the Finnish holding company whose subsidiary Saldo Bank UAB holds a banking licence granted by the European Central Bank and regulated by the Bank of Lithuania.
The deal is subject to regulatory approvals and is expected to close in 2027. Financial terms were not disclosed.
What Saldo brings to the table
Saldo Bank currently serves customers in Lithuania, Finland, Sweden and Germany, with a passport to operate in the Netherlands. Its product suite includes retail term deposits across all four active markets, consumer loans in Lithuania, Finland and Sweden, and secured and unsecured SME loans in Lithuania and Finland. A credit card is live in Finland and is scheduled to launch in Sweden next year. The bank also provides embedded lending infrastructure to other fintech firms operating in Finland and Germany, making it a B2B player as well as a direct-to-consumer lender. At the end of September 2026, the bank employed just over 90 people.
For Payward, the acquisition extends a licensing stack it has been assembling over several years. The group already holds a Federal Reserve limited-purpose master account in the United States and an e-money institution licence granted by the Central Bank of Ireland. An EU banking licence is a material step up: it unlocks deposit-taking, card issuance, lending and full SEPA payment rails under a single regulated entity, with passporting as the mechanism for cross-border scale.
Co-chief executive Arjun Sethi was direct about the commercial logic. “A regulated EU bank is the piece that lets us serve European clients the way a primary financial institution should: one place to hold assets, move them freely, and put them to work,” he said. “We believe whoever owns that relationship earns the right to serve everything around it.”
Payward Banking, the banking pillar of the wider group, has already originated more than two billion dollars in loans. The Saldo acquisition is designed to bring that lending capability into the European regulatory perimeter, alongside yield-bearing deposits and banking-as-a-service functionality for third-party fintech clients.
Regulatory and competitive read-across
The transaction sits inside a broader pattern of crypto-adjacent infrastructure groups seeking full banking status in the EU. Holding a banking licence rather than an EMI licence matters for several reasons: deposit-guarantee scheme membership, the ability to pay interest on deposits, and access to central bank liquidity facilities. It also brings tighter capital requirements under the Capital Requirements Regulation and direct supervisory oversight from the ECB, which adds compliance overhead but confers credibility with institutional clients and corporate treasurers.
The EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation, which reached its final implementation phase this year, has sharpened the commercial value of regulated banking infrastructure for digital-asset firms. MiCA creates a clear authorisation pathway for crypto-asset service providers, but it does not grant deposit-taking or lending powers. A bank licence does. For Payward, which already trades under the Kraken brand with a significant European retail and institutional client base, combining MiCA-authorised crypto services with a licensed bank gives it a more complete financial institution proposition than most peers can currently assemble.
Competitors in the space, including several neobanks and banking-as-a-service platforms with EU licences, have generally grown the bank-to-crypto direction rather than the crypto-to-bank direction Payward is taking. Whether the regulator-to-regulator transfer of supervisory confidence is straightforward will depend on how the Bank of Lithuania and ECB view the change of control and the acquirer’s compliance framework. The 2027 close timeline suggests Payward is not expecting a quick approval.
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