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Payward to Acquire Saldo Bank in EU Banking Licence Push

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Payward to Acquire Saldo Bank in EU Banking Licence Push

The deal is subject to regulatory approvals and is expected to close in 2027. Financial terms were not disclosed.

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.



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