Did Kraken itself buy a bank, or was it a different company?

Technically it's Payward, Kraken's parent holding company, that signed the deal. Kraken is Payward's crypto exchange brand, but Payward also runs other financial products, and it's Payward's name on the acquisition agreement for Saldo Finance Oy. For most users this distinction doesn't matter day to day, but it matters for regulators, since Payward is the entity that would hold the EU banking license once the deal closes.

Is Saldo Bank based in Lithuania or Finland?

Both, in a sense, which is why early headlines disagreed. The bank Payward will end up controlling, Saldo Bank UAB, is licensed and headquartered in Lithuania, where the European Central Bank granted it a specialized banking license in October 2021. But Payward isn't buying that bank directly — it's buying Saldo Finance Oy, a Finnish holding company that owns Saldo Bank UAB. So the acquisition target is a Finnish parent of a Lithuanian bank.

Can I use Kraken as a bank account now?

Not yet, and not necessarily even after the deal closes. The agreement is still subject to regulatory approval from EU authorities and isn't expected to close until sometime in 2027. Even then, Payward has described rolling out deposit and lending products gradually, market by market, rather than flipping on full banking services for all Kraken users at once. Nothing about how you use Kraken today changes because of this announcement.

Why would a crypto exchange want to own a bank instead of just partnering with one?

Owning the license removes a dependency that has repeatedly hurt crypto firms: banking partners that get skittish, get pressured by their own regulators, or simply exit the relationship, cutting off deposits, withdrawals, or card issuance with little warning. A bank license controlled directly by Payward means it sets its own risk policies for crypto-related accounts instead of relying on a third-party bank's willingness to keep the relationship. It also lets Payward build new revenue lines, like interest-bearing accounts and lending, that it couldn't offer as a pure exchange.

Kraken's Parent Company Is Buying a European Bank: The Payward-Saldo Deal Explained

Payward, the parent company of cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, agreed on October 14, 2026 to acquire Saldo Finance Oy, a Finnish holding company whose subsidiary, Saldo Bank UAB, holds a specialized banking license in Lithuania. The deal, reported first by the Financial Times and confirmed by multiple outlets, makes Payward the first cryptocurrency company to agree to buy a licensed bank in the European Union. It still needs regulatory sign-off and isn’t expected to close until 2027.

What Payward actually agreed to buy

Payward signed a definitive agreement to acquire Saldo Finance Oy, not Saldo Bank UAB directly. Saldo Finance is a Finnish holding company, and Saldo Bank UAB is its Lithuanian banking subsidiary — the entity that actually holds the regulatory license. Buying the holding company is the mechanism by which Payward will end up controlling the bank and its license.

The Bank of Lithuania’s register shows that Saldo Bank UAB received its specialized bank license from the European Central Bank in October 2021 and began operating under it in February 2023, making it reportedly the eighth institution in Europe to hold that type of license. In the years since, Saldo built out licensing coverage beyond Lithuania: it’s also licensed to operate in Finland, Sweden, and Germany, and holds a passport to do business in the Netherlands.

Financial details on Saldo are modest and come from pre-deal reporting rather than Payward’s own disclosures. Reported figures put the bank’s assets at roughly €162.9 million at the end of 2025, with about €962,000 in profit for that year; some outlets cite the figure in dollar terms as roughly $180–190 million in total assets. Neither Payward nor Kraken has disclosed the purchase price, and none of the public reporting includes one.

CoinDesk had reported back in July 2026 that Kraken was separately pursuing its own Lithuanian banking license application. The Saldo acquisition appears to be the faster route to the same destination: buying an existing, already-operating license instead of building one from zero through the normal application process.

Why buy a license instead of applying for one

Getting a new banking license from an EU regulator is slow, and crypto companies in particular have a track record of getting stuck in the queue or rejected outright, even after holding other EU approvals. Payward already has pieces of the regulatory puzzle in place — Kraken holds a MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation) license from the Central Bank of Ireland, granted in June 2025, and Payward separately holds an Irish e-money license — but none of that confers the ability to take deposits or make loans the way a chartered bank can.

Acquiring Saldo sidesteps the license-application bottleneck. Once the deal closes and the transfer of control is approved by the relevant authorities, Payward inherits a bank that’s already licensed, already operating in four countries, and already connected to European payment rails. That’s a meaningfully faster path to banking functionality than starting an application from scratch, even accounting for the time a change-of-control review will take.

Payward co-CEO Arjun Sethi framed the move around unmet customer demand rather than regulatory arbitrage. In comments carried in the Financial Times’ report on the deal, he said customers had been asking for “products and services and offerings similar to what I get with another bank” — meaning conventional retail banking features layered on top of crypto trading. In Payward’s own announcement, Sethi said: “A regulated EU bank is the piece that lets us serve European clients the way a primary financial institution should.” He also described the company’s banking ambitions as being built “license by license, market by market,” adding that the EU is the starting point and “the ambition is global.”

What changes for users, and when

Nothing changes immediately. The deal is subject to standard closing conditions, including approval from EU banking and competition regulators, and Payward and Saldo are both targeting a 2027 close. Until that approval comes through and integration work happens, Saldo continues operating as it does today, and Kraken’s existing products are unaffected.

Once the deal closes, Payward has said its plans include paying interest on customer deposits, expanding lending (including credit cards), and offering banking-as-a-service infrastructure — things like card issuance and SEPA payment access — to other companies, not just Kraken’s own retail users. That last piece matters: it signals Payward sees the bank as a platform business in its own right, not solely a feature bolted onto the exchange.

How this compares to the US approach: buying a bank vs. chartering one

Europe isn’t the only place crypto companies have been pursuing banking powers in 2026. In the US, the path has generally run through national trust bank charters granted by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) rather than through acquiring an existing depository institution. Ripple received final OCC approval in October 2026 to open Ripple National Trust Bank — a deal explained in more detail in our piece on Ripple’s OCC approval — while Circle has operated its own national trust bank for its USDC reserves since 2025.

	Payward / Saldo Bank (EU)	Ripple National Trust Bank (US)
Mechanism	Acquire an existing licensed bank	Apply for a new OCC trust charter
What it allows	Deposits, lending, credit cards, payments infrastructure	Holding reserves/collateral as a fiduciary; no commercial lending or retail deposits
Regulator	Bank of Lithuania / EU authorities (change-of-control review)	Office of the Comptroller of the Currency
Status as of Nov 2026	Agreement signed Oct 14, 2026; pending approval, expected close 2027	Final OCC approval granted Oct 2026
Underlying license age	Saldo’s license dates to 2021	New charter issued directly to Ripple

The two paths solve different problems. A US national trust charter, as Ripple and Circle have used it, is narrower: it lets a company act as a fiduciary holding reserves or collateral, but it doesn’t grant the ability to take retail deposits or make commercial loans. Buying a full-service EU bank like Saldo is a broader move — it brings deposit-taking, lending, and payments infrastructure that a trust charter doesn’t. Both reflect the same underlying trend, though: large crypto firms deciding that renting banking relationships from outside partners is a long-term liability, and that owning regulated banking infrastructure directly is worth the cost and complexity of getting there.

That trend also connects to how EU regulators have been tightening supervision of crypto-adjacent financial products more broadly under MiCA — see our coverage of the European Banking Authority’s decision to put USDC under direct EU-level supervision as another example of EU regulators drawing large crypto-linked entities more tightly into the conventional banking supervisory framework rather than leaving them in a separate, lighter-touch regime.

Why crypto exchanges keep losing bank partners

The strategic logic behind owning a bank outright, rather than partnering with one, comes from a real and recurring problem in the crypto industry: banking relationships have proven unreliable. Exchanges and crypto-focused firms have repeatedly had banking partners restrict, delay, or terminate services — sometimes because the bank’s own regulators pressured it to reduce crypto exposure, sometimes because the bank’s risk appetite simply changed. When that happens to a firm that depends entirely on third-party banks, deposits and withdrawals can be disrupted with little warning, and the firm has limited recourse.

Owning the license removes that single point of failure. Payward, as the bank’s owner, would set its own risk and compliance policies for crypto-related accounts rather than being subject to another institution’s. That’s the core argument Sethi has made publicly, and it’s the same logic that pushed Ripple and Circle toward their own US trust charters: control over the banking relationship is increasingly viewed as infrastructure a large crypto company can’t safely outsource.

What’s still uncertain

A few things about this deal remain open. The purchase price hasn’t been disclosed by either party. The exact timeline for new deposit and lending products reaching Kraken’s EU customers after closing hasn’t been specified — Payward has talked about a gradual, market-by-market rollout rather than an immediate switch-on. And the deal still has to clear regulatory review in multiple jurisdictions tied to Saldo’s existing licenses in Lithuania, Finland, Sweden, and Germany, any of which could add delay or conditions before a 2027 close actually happens.

Not financial advice. None of this changes how you should evaluate Kraken, Payward, or any related token or product as an investment. If you’re a Kraken user in the EU, there’s nothing to do differently today — the practical changes, if they arrive at all, are still more than a year out. As always with regulatory and corporate developments in crypto, treat specific numbers and timelines as subject to change until confirmed by the companies themselves, and consult a qualified professional before making financial decisions based on a pending acquisition.

Sources: Bloomberg, CoinDesk, Yahoo Finance, Fortune, PYMNTS.