We’ve signed a definitive agreement to acquire Saldo Bank, a digital-first, EU-licensed bank with passporting across five European markets. It’s a deliberate next step in an infrastructure strategy we’ve been building for years.
The infrastructure play, not the news story
Most acquisition announcements lead with the news. We’ll lead with the architecture.
The news, briefly: Payward has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Saldo Finance Oy, a Finnish holding company whose subsidiary, Saldo Bank UAB (“Saldo Bank”), is a digital-first specialized bank licensed in Lithuania.
Payward Banking isn’t new. It’s not a pivot or a bet on a trend. It’s a layered build of regulated infrastructure, market by market, license by license. We have a Federal Reserve limited-purpose master account in the US. We hold an EMI license from the Central Bank of Ireland. We’ve originated over $2 billion in loans. Each piece serves a purpose: to sit underneath the products and services customers actually use, and to move money where it needs to move without asking a third party for permission.
An EU banking license extends that stack into Europe’s largest regulated market, and it’s the next major step in the buildout. Saldo Bank brings that license. It also brings something less obvious but more durable: a footprint across four operating markets plus a passport into the Netherlands, deposit products already live in market, lending infrastructure, and a team that has built banking-as-a-service capabilities for other fintechs.
We’re not acquiring a bank to be a bank. We’re acquiring the infrastructure to let Payward serve European clients the way a primary financial institution should: one place to hold assets, move them freely, and put them to work.
What this means for European customers
When this closes (expected in 2027), the acquisition is expected to enable Payward Banking to offer the following, subject to regulatory approvals:
Interest on deposits. Real yield on assets held in the system, building on the retail term deposits Saldo Bank already offers in Lithuania, Finland, Sweden, and Germany.
Lending products. Secured and unsecured SME loans, consumer lending, and credit cards, products Saldo has already built and is scaling. Our SME lending roadmap accelerates materially.
Banking-as-a-service. Passporting, card issuance, and SME lending capabilities, plus full SEPA payments access and embedded lending infrastructure for partners building on top of Payward. This is the part most people won’t see but every fintech builder will feel.
The deposits, the lending, the card products: these aren’t new categories. The infrastructure to offer them directly to customers in a unified system, with the compliance and capital architecture already solved, is the unlock.
Saldo’s footprint, our infrastructure
Saldo Bank today serves retail and SME customers across its licensed markets. It holds retail term deposits in every market, consumer lending in Lithuania, Finland and Sweden, and SME lending in Lithuania and Finland. Its credit card launched in Finland and is expected to launch in Sweden in 2027. It also operates embedded lending partnerships in Finland and Germany, with fintech companies using Saldo’s lending infrastructure for their own customers.
Jarkko Mäensivu, President of Saldo Bank, put it simply: “A banking license is only as valuable as what you build on top of it. 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. Combining these capabilities with our five-market footprint means far more customers can access the full range of what both businesses offer - banking, payments, and lending in one place.”
That’s the architecture at work.
The long game
Arjun Sethi, Co-CEO of Payward, framed it this way: “Payward Banking is not a new ambition - it is a business we have been building license by license, market by market. 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.”
That’s the thesis underneath every license we acquire, every infrastructure layer we build. Primary financial relationships matter. Whoever has the right to deposit, lend to, and issue payment instruments to a customer owns the relationship. Everything else, including trading, staking, wealth management, and treasury services, sits on top of that foundation.
Saldo gives us that foundation in Europe. The work now is executing the integration and earning regulatory approval. Both are underway.
The transaction is expected to close in 2027, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals.
