Bank of Lithuania and Revolut team up for payments
The signing
Bank of Lithuania, the country’s central bank and regulator, has signed a memorandum of understanding with UK-based payments and fintech start-up Revolut.
Revolut intends to set up a financial institution in Lithuania and obtain a banking licence. Bank of Lithuania will provide Revolut with access to its managed payment systems enabling cross-border payments in euro. It will also assist Revolut in the necessary preparations and provide consultation.
“We want to encourage competition,” Marius Jurgilas, member of the board of the Bank of Lithuania, tells Banking Technology. “And as a regulator, we are keen to embrace innovation.”
Competition is beneficial for consumers, he states.
“Financial service providers entering Lithuania and operating at the international level are proof that the conditions to begin operations in our country are favourable: starting with regulation and ending with the technical infrastructure – payments in euro through the Bank of Lithuania’s system are executed quickly and reliably,” says Jurgilas.
Revolut started operating in 2015. It offers e-transfers, currency exchange, card payments and cash withdrawal across Europe. Nikolay Storonsky, CEO of Revolut, says the company is already active in the UK, Germany and Spain. In terms of scale, the company grew from onboarding a couple of hundred customers a day to several thousand a day.
The announcement was made during the FinTech Conference taking place in Vilnius, attended by Banking Technology.
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