Kraken Parent Payward to Acquire European Bank

Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, has signed an agreement to acquire Finnish holding company Saldo Finance Oy, the owner of Lithuania-licensed Saldo Bank, the company said on Wednesday. Financial terms were not disclosed and the transaction is expected to close in 2027. If completed, it would place Payward among the first major cryptocurrency exchange operators to directly own and run a fully licensed bank inside the European Union.

Saldo Bank operates in Lithuania, Finland, Sweden and Germany, and holds passporting rights in the Netherlands. Its product set includes retail term deposits across all of those markets, consumer loans in Lithuania, Finland and Sweden, and SME lending in Lithuania and Finland. The bank's credit card is live in Finland and is scheduled to expand to Sweden by 2027. It also provides SEPA payment access and embedded lending services to fintechs in Finland and Germany.

Payward Banking ambitions

Under the plan, Payward Banking would offer deposits, lending, card issuance and banking-as-a-service to European clients, adding a licensed banking layer to an integrated fiat-and-crypto platform that spans trading, payments and credit. "Payward Banking is not a new ambition – it is a business we have been building license by license, market by market," said Arjun Sethi, Co-CEO of Payward. The bank, he added, is the piece that lets the group serve European clients as a primary financial institution.

The acquisition is the latest step in an EU consolidation push under Sethi, building on Payward's existing MiFID, MiCA and EMI authorizations. The strategy runs in the opposite direction to neobanks such as Revolut, which built large user bases through payments before adding crypto and derivatives. Payward is instead moving from crypto into full banking to capture more of each customer's wallet. The approach echoes multi-asset super-app efforts elsewhere in the CFD sector, such as NAGA's ambitions, though Payward is also building infrastructure for other financial firms rather than only a consumer app.

Operating across several regulated verticals carries its own risks. Adding full-scale banking brings heavier cross-border European regulatory scrutiny and widens the group's exposure to financial crime and cyber attacks, risks recently underlined by security vulnerabilities reported at Revolut.