Kraken Owner Payward Agrees to Buy Lithuania's Saldo Bank

Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, on Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2026, signed an agreement to acquire Finland's Saldo Finance Oy and its subsidiary Saldo Bank UAB, a digital-first specialized bank licensed in Lithuania, the company said in a press release. Terms were not disclosed, and the deal is expected to close in 2027, subject to regulatory approvals.

Details

Saldo Bank operates in Lithuania, Finland, Sweden and Germany and holds a passport into the Netherlands, giving it reach into five European markets. It takes retail term deposits, offers consumer loans in Lithuania, Finland and Sweden, lends to small businesses in Lithuania and Finland, and has launched a credit card in Finland, with Sweden expected in 2027.

Payward plans to build its Payward Banking unit on top of the license: deposit interest, SME and consumer lending, credit cards, card issuing, banking-as-a-service and full SEPA payments access. The company says it already has a limited-purpose master account at the Federal Reserve, an e-money license from the Central Bank of Ireland and more than $2 billion in loans originated. "We are starting in the EU, and the ambition is global," co-CEO Arjun Sethi said in the release.

Decrypt, citing the Financial Times, reported that Payward is the first digital asset company to buy a bank in Europe. Sethi said customers have been asking for bank-like products and that the goal is to bring cash, crypto, tokenized stocks and credit into a single system, so users can borrow against assets without selling them. Earlier this year Payward bought derivatives exchange Bitnomial for $550 million and Asian stablecoin payments firm Reap for $600 million.

What it means for the market

Big exchanges are steadily turning into banks. In the U.S., Payward applied in May for a national trust charter from the OCC, a type of approval Coinbase and Ripple have already received conditionally. An EU bank of its own would give Kraken direct access to euro deposits and lending without intermediaries, and strengthens its hand ahead of an IPO that CoinDesk reported has been pushed back to the second quarter of 2027 at the earliest.

For bitcoin holders, the most relevant piece is future crypto-backed lending inside a regulated bank, but until the deal closes and regulators sign off, that remains a plan. For live market moves, see the daily dashboard.