Motivated talent and a forward-thinking regulator – that is what a leading financial technology platform Airwallex cites among the reasons for establishing operations in Lithuania. After obtaining an electronic money institution (EMI) licence from the Bank of Lithuania, the company set up an EMEA service hub Airwallex Lithuania in Vilnius in 2022. Today, Airwallex is looking to expand its local team to support future growth in Lithuania and across the region. Global fintech Airwallex provides financial infrastructure for businesses to accept payments and move money internationally. The company’s platform offers a streamlined and cost-efficient way to manage everything from treasury…

Salv, the regtech startup founded by former Wise and Skype employees, closes a €4m seed round extension led by ffVC, with German G+D Ventures and existing investors also participating. The funds will allow Salv to further develop its modular regtech technology and support geographical expansion to new territories, including Poland. Salv’s collaborative crime-fighting technology Salv’s offering entails all the necessary AML functionality for financial services companies, such as automatically identifying and prioritising suspicious activity and processing vast amounts of data in real-time. The company’s toolset also includes its proprietary collaborative crime-fighting platform – Salv Bridge, which uses the collective power…

At the end of the day every entrepreneur wants to see how much profit they’ve made. In the world of e-commerce, nothing beats conversion when the client acts on your marketing appeal – unless a visitor buys something, is there any point in carrying on? At a time when the cost per attracted buyer keeps rising, all businesses are in stiff competition to boost their rates of conversion. Here talking about how entrepreneurs can make their first steps in the digital environment and pick cooperation partners that will care about conversion as much as they do, is the head of…

Anyfin, a Swedish scaleup that enables consumers to refinance existing loans and take control of their financial wellbeing, announced that it has completed a €30 million Series C funding round. The capital will fuel the growth of its business across Europe, as well as helping Anyfin to strengthen its product suite in existing Europe markets. The cost of living crisis has been impacting customers worldwide and is increasing at its fastest rate in 40 years. The macro environment has a massive impact on household budgets, affecting consumers’ financial wellbeing and business’ balance sheets. Since the spiral of costs started, Anyfin’s…

Technology is something that tends to introduce itself to our lives first in the realm of conversation, whether it is as the result of the announcement of a new product or a prediction by an expert as to what will come next. Following this, a select few acquire the new product or service, before it eventually finds itself in the hands of the masses. Within the blink of an eye, this new technology, which at one point felt as if it was a lifetime away, is now an integral part of our daily lives. It is this process of integration…

Vilnius-based Practica Capital announced the first closing of its €70M target size Practica Venture Capital III fund at €32M. The fund will focus on backing the Baltic founders from pre-seed to A round, making it the biggest such dedicated vehicle in the region to date. “We are in the strongest pound-for-pound tech ecosystems in Europe – the 6M populated Baltic States are consistent in producing outlier outcomes in tech and making a paramount impact for local economies,” said Arvydas Bložė, partner at Practica Capital. “Lithuanian and Latvian tech ecosystems are at an inflection point and will inevitably follow the trailblazer…

LPB Bank stands out against the background of the banks of the Baltic banking market with its financial and technological solutions, which are already successfully used by fintech companies, as well as the constant development of the technologies. The bank’s mission is to provide a full range of services to companies in the fintech industry soon, notes Staņislavs Siņakovičs, Head of the Business Development Department at LPB Bank. “Banks nowadays are in stiff competition for human resources with fintech. The financial technology sector often offers higher pay, but the future prospects of many such start-ups are difficult to forecast –…

Mastercard has announced the winners of its Lighthouse 2022 Fall Finale at the “Fintech & Impact: Born For This Moment” side event at Slush in Helsinki. Lighthouse is a collaboration network that fosters symbiotic growth between banks, fintechs and Mastercard. Meanwhile, Lighthouse MASSIV helps social impact and sustainability-focused companies scale through partnerships. Forming part of Mastercard Lighthouse, the two programs represent core foundations of Mastercard’s wider commitment to empower Baltics and Nordics startups to fulfill their ambitions at scale and speed. A total of 15 fintech companies, 10 from the Nordic region and five from the Baltic region, were selected…

Financial brokerage company Fundvest launches a new mobile application in Lithuania that provides access to the stock exchanges of the United States of America and the European Union. Using the app, users can purchase stocks and ETFs, conduct automated investing, and communicate with other application members. According to the company’s founders, the uniqueness of Fundvest is transparency and lower fees – investors can make a transaction for a fixed 0.35 percent commission fee. The company’s office, the largest in the Baltic countries, has been opened in Vilnius. It will serve customers, continue developing and improving software, cover compliance and anti-money…

SaltPay, a UK-based Fintech company that provides affordable and secure payment and software solutions for small and medium-sized businesses, has announced that it has acquired two Latvian firms, MeaWallet and A-Heads Consulting. This acquisition is part of SaltPay’s plan to establish a new engineering hub in Riga. MeaWallet is known for its card tokenisation platform and SoftPOS solutions, while A-Heads Consulting helps financial institutions in the Baltics to integrate and launch payment and banking solutions. With the acquisition of these two companies, SaltPay will be able to tap into their expertise and local knowledge as it expands its presence in…

Earlier this year, the Lithuanian parliament approved amendments to the Labour Code, a development which the government hopes will help attract more highly qualified technology specialists from abroad but also entice highly skilled Lithuanian citizens who have left the country to come back home. In accordance with the new provisions, highly skilled engineering, information technology (IT), physical sciences and biotechnology specialists are now eligible to lump-sum payments to help cover part of the relocation costs, the Seimas, the Lithuanian parliament, said. The program also includes a financial incentive for employers that hire highly skilled employees from abroad. The program, which…

UBS has partnered with Latvian identity verification company Regula to create a fully automated and 24/7 account opening process for new customers. Instead of real-time video interviews, which were previously required by UBS to verify new customers, the enrollment process now takes just a few minutes on the UBS Mobile Banking app. Using Regula’s identity verification solutions, UBS can recognise and authenticate documents and compare document portraits with users’ selfies to verify their identities. UBS, which also partnered with iProov, is said to be the first bank in Switzerland to enable automatic identity verification and electronic signature creation for opening bank accounts.…

Estonian crypto platform Kriptomat has partnered with UK payment gateway provider Volt to enable customers to make real-time account-to-account payments to buy, sell and exchange cryptocurrencies. Prior to integrating with Volt, Kriptomat customers used bank transfers, credit cards and e-wallets for transactions which meant that funds could take three to five business days to reach accounts. With Volt, Kriptomat users will be directed to their banking app where they can authorise payments to transfer and access funds in real-time. Founded in 2018 in Tallinn, Kriptomat has a customer base of over 500,000 users, mostly in Central and Eastern Europe. The…

Estonian cross border lending platform Mifundo has raised €1.2 million in pre-seed funding led by Opus11 VC, with angel investors LHV Bank’s Jüri Laur and Iizi Kindlustusmaakler’s Kaido Kepp. Mifundo aims to build a platform to enable people to apply for loans from banks across the European Union and is building an AI-based solution that treats the bloc as a single credit market. The platform is being developed with scientists from the University of Tartu, with the support of the European Regional Development Fund and EAS. Mifundo is headquartered in Tallinn, Estonia, and was founded in 2018 by the former…

London-based investing app Lightyear has launched business accounts in Estonia to enable freelancers and small business owners to invest in the global stock market. Estonian businesses will be able to invest in stocks and ETFs from the US and Europe through their Lightyear business accounts. Investments in Euro markets are free, while a fixed fee is charged for other markets. According to Lightyear, gains from investments on its business accounts will only be taxed when they are withdrawn from the account or distributed as dividends since investment income in Estonia is taxed in the same way as normal business income.…

Lithuanian payment processor Paysera has partnered with payments infrastructure platform Airwallex to enable its clients to send money to 149 countries and open IBAN accounts of 9 countries. Paysera is a licensed e-money institution providing payment gateways, currency conversion, payment cards, an event ticketing platform, a parcel locker network, and a finance management app. The company also announced in mid-2021 that it has partnered with German neobank N26 to offer its payment processing services in 18 European countries. Founded in 2004 in Vilnius, Paysera has one million app installs and generated EUR 13 million in revenue in 2020. The company…

The Estonian Financial Supervisory Authority or Finantsinspektsioon has granted TINV Europe, a part of the Wise group which provides online money transfer service, a license to provide investment and ancillary services in the country. Wise is now allowed to accept securities orders and send them, execute securities orders in the name of clients or in its own name, and trade with securities on its own account. The company can also hold and manage the securities of clients, and provide services relating to foreign exchange if they are linked to the provision of investment services. Wise says that it hopes to…

UK-based cross-border payments platform ArcaPay has entered the Latvian market to provide SMEs with trading partners outside the eurozone an alternative to commercial banks. ArcaPay specialises in cross-border payment, foreign exchange and currency risk management solutions. Its services are built for importing and exporting businesses that handle foreign currencies in their business, e.g. when paying suppliers abroad. Founded in London in 2011, ArcaPay says that it serves clients in over 20 countries and offers them payments in over 30 currencies to more than 100 destination countries. Latvia is the third country the company has expanded into, with the second being…

Striga, formerly known as Lastbit, is the first company to be awarded a virtual asset service provider (VASP) license in Estonia under the amended Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing Prevention Act. Founded in 2018, Striga is building a crypto-native banking as a service platform for card issuing, IBANs, managed crypto wallets with custody and trading, and compliance. The company has raised US$3 million in seed funding from Y Combinator and Brazilian venture capital firm Bossanova so far. The license approval indicates that Striga has been able to meet the Estonian Financial Intelligence Unit’s (FIU) enhanced regulations which came into force…

The central bank of Latvia’s semi-annual “Payment Radar” report found that the ratio of non-cash and cash payments in the country stood at 71% to 29% as at August 2022. The ratio of cash and non-cash payments in the previous February 2022 report was 74% to 26%. Cash availability is a matter of public interest in Latvia, especially in the last two years given the country’s proximity to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Public satisfaction with regards to the possibility to withdraw cash from bank accounts remained stable in the latest report, with 84% of those surveyed being completely or rather satisfied…