Kraken's Parent Agrees to Buy a Lithuanian Bank, the First Such Deal by a Crypto Firm in the EU

Payward, the company behind the Kraken exchange, has agreed to buy Saldo Bank of Lithuania, making it the first crypto firm to acquire a bank inside the European Union, CoinDesk reported. Saldo reported €196.9m of total assets at the end of June, according to The Defiant, a figure CoinDesk put at around $190m. The deal is expected to close in 2027 and is subject to regulatory approval.

What Payward is buying is not a customer base of that size but a licence. A credit institution licence in an EU member state permits deposit-taking and lending, and it passports across the bloc, meaning the holder can serve customers in other member states without a separate authorisation in each. That is a different permission from the one a crypto exchange normally holds, which lets it trade and custody assets but not take deposits or extend credit.

Why an exchange wants to lend

Co-CEO Arjun Sethi said customers want cash, crypto, tokenized stocks and credit in one place, with lending and card products first, according to Decrypt. That describes a brokerage drifting towards a bank rather than a bank adding crypto. The economics are familiar: an exchange earns fees on turnover, which is cyclical, while a bank earns a spread on deposits, which is not. Owning the deposit relationship also removes a dependency on third-party banking partners, which has historically been the weakest link in the crypto industry's plumbing.

The timing against the regulatory backdrop

The purchase lands at a moment when the question of banks and crypto is live on both sides of the Atlantic. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the US national bank regulator, reported finding debanking policies at nine major US banks, with digital-asset issuers and exchanges among those facing restrictions, according to The Defiant. Buying a bank is the most direct available answer to being refused one.

Lithuania as a jurisdiction

Lithuania has been the entry point of choice for fintech firms seeking EU authorisation for the better part of a decade, with a regulator that built a specialised licensing track and a cluster of e-money and specialised bank licences as a result. A specialised bank licence of the kind Saldo holds carries lower capital requirements than a full universal bank licence and restricts the activities permitted, typically excluding investment services.

What is still open

Closing in 2027 means roughly a year of regulatory review, and the approval is not a formality: a change of control at a credit institution requires the supervisor to assess the acquirer's fitness, capital and business plan. Nothing in the announcement establishes what Payward intends to pay, how Kraken's existing European entities would be reorganised around the bank, or whether tokenized stocks, which Sethi named, would be offered through the bank or alongside it.

The precedent

If the deal closes, it establishes that the route from crypto exchange to regulated deposit-taker runs through acquisition rather than through a greenfield application. That is a faster path and a more expensive one, and other large exchanges with European ambitions will have read the same arithmetic.