A financial-technology firm serving customers in Lisbon, Warsaw and Berlin can be licensed, and supervised, entirely from Vilnius.
One central bank, in a country of fewer than three million people, stands behind a large slice of the EU’s fintech payments industry.
And it is now quietly backing away from the job.
When the United Kingdom left the EU, it took London’s financial passporting rights with it, and Lithuania stepped in, building one of the EU’s largest concentrations of electronic money and payment institutions.
At the end of 2024 it licensed 119 of them, moving €152bn that year. The market is lopsided: 10 firms handle about two-thirds of that flow, above a long tail of small players. One supervisor answers for the lot.
