Buying Lithuania-based Saldo Bank would give Payward an upgrade from the Ireland-issued electronic money institutions license it now carries. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The Saldo acquisition builds on other licensing advancements Payward has made this year – particularly, the master account it received in March from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, and the national trust bank charter it applied for in May from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

"Payward Banking is not a new ambition - it is a business we have been building license by license, market by market," Arjun Sethi, Payward’s co-CEO, said in a statement Wednesday. "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. We believe whoever owns that relationship earns the right to serve everything around it. We are starting in the EU, and the ambition is global."

The Saldo acquisition is expected to let Payward offer its European users interest on deposits, lending products and banking-as-a-service capabilities such as card issuance and small and medium enterprise lending.

“A banking license is only as valuable as what you build on top of it,” Saldo Bank President Jarkko Mäensivu said in a statement Wednesday. “Payward has spent years assembling regulated infrastructure across the US and Europe. Saldo Bank’s infrastructure was built to be Europe-wide, enabling innovative banking solutions including embedded services for other fintechs.

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