Kraken Owner Payward Signs Deal to Buy Lithuania's Saldo Bank

Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, has signed a definitive agreement to buy Saldo Finance Oy, a Finnish holding company whose subsidiary Saldo Bank UAB is a licensed bank in Lithuania.

The price was not disclosed. Payward expects the deal to close in 2027, subject to regulatory approvals.

Saldo is a small bank. It had 86 employees at the end of 2025 and €162.9 million in total assets, and in 2025 it posted its first profitable year, a net profit of €962,000 after a €2.4 million loss in 2024. What Payward is buying is mostly the licence underneath those numbers, and the particular way that licence is limited.

A Narrow Licence, Chosen on Purpose

Saldo Bank is a specialised bank, licensed by the European Central Bank and regulated by the Bank of Lithuania. It received its licence in October 2021 and opened for business in Lithuania in February 2023.

Lithuania set up the specialised bank regime in 2017. These banks can take deposits, make loans and move money, but they are not allowed to sell investment services. That is a narrower set of powers than a full commercial banking licence carries, and it covers the pieces Payward says it wants: a regulated place to hold customer cash, pay interest on it, and lend against it.

Payward says the licence passports across five European markets. Saldo holds retail term deposits in every market, offers consumer lending in Lithuania, Finland and Sweden, and lends to small and medium-sized businesses in Lithuania and Finland. Its credit card launched in Finland and is expected in Sweden in 2027.

Deposits, Loans and Cards on Top of Saldo's Book

Payward's announcement sets out three things it expects the acquisition to enable once it closes, all subject to regulatory approvals:

• Interest on deposits, building on the retail term deposits Saldo already offers in Lithuania, Finland, Sweden and Germany.
• Lending products: secured and unsecured SME loans, consumer lending and credit cards.
• Banking-as-a-service for other companies: passporting, card issuance, SME lending, full SEPA payments access and embedded lending infrastructure.

Saldo is already doing part of this. It runs embedded lending partnerships in Finland and Germany, where fintechs use its lending infrastructure for their own customers. In Lithuania it offers unsecured consumer loans up to €5,000 and business loans up to €50,000 without collateral.

"A banking license is only as valuable as what you build on top of it."

Jarkko Mäensivu, president of Saldo Bank, said that. Arjun Sethi, Payward's co-CEO, described Payward Banking as "a business we have been building license by license, market by market," with a regulated EU bank as the piece that lets it serve European clients as a primary financial institution.

The Rest of the Licence Stack

Payward says it already holds a limited-purpose master account with the Federal Reserve in the US, an EMI licence from the Central Bank of Ireland, and has originated over $2 billion in loans. Kraken Financial, the group's Wyoming-chartered bank, received its Fed master account in March 2026, giving it direct access to Federal Reserve payment rails such as Fedwire.

It has also been buying. Payward completed its purchase of derivatives exchange Bitnomial for up to $550 million on May 4, 2026, and its purchase of stablecoin payments firm Reap for $600 million on July 1, 2026. It bought retail futures platform NinjaTrader for $1.5 billion in 2025. A full VARA licence in Dubai fits the same market-by-market pattern.

Kraken filed confidentially for an IPO in November 2025, and the listing has since slipped to the second quarter of 2027 at the earliest.

What Still Has to Happen

Under the EU's Single Supervisory Mechanism, the ECB decides whether a buyer can take a significant stake in a euro area bank, usually on a proposal from the Bank of Lithuania. That is the gate this deal has to pass.

Two details are worth holding loosely. Saldo's 2025 report notes that the Bank of Lithuania carried out a planned full-scope on-site inspection in the fourth quarter of 2025, and that the bank was preparing an action plan to address the deficiencies identified in it. And nothing has been said about whether the Saldo name survives the deal, or when any of the new products would reach Kraken customers.

For now Payward has a signed agreement, a bank that made €962,000 last year, and a licence that is narrower than it sounds. The closing date is 2027.