LHV Bank completes business transfer and strengthens its BaaS offering

LHV Bank, the UK’s newest licensed bank, has finalised the business transfer from its Estonian affiliate, AS LHV Bank’s UK branch, to its newly licensed entity. This transition, affecting LHV Bank’s Banking Services clients in the UK, follows LHV Bank receiving its banking licence this May and the subsequent approval from the UK High Court to transfer the business.

As a result, the GBP payment services associated with the Banking Services business have been moved from the previous branch to the new bank. This transition also included the transfer of associated GBP payment scheme memberships and related contracts.

At the same time, LHV Bank implemented a new cloud-based core banking system and successfully migrated the customer data from the Estonian core banking system to the new LHV Bank system in the UK. This modern infrastructure simplifies GBP payment systems integration for UK clients, improves reliability, and allows for better scalability of their operations.

Erki Kilu, CEO of LHV Bank, stated, “The preparation for this business transfer has spanned over a year and a half. The whole project has been sizable, both legally and technically. During this period, we have built a completely new banking software, culminating in what is arguably the most state-of-the-art banking system, giving us a technological advantage for the foreseeable future. Today, our clients, along with their data, have been successfully transitioned to this new system.

“When building this system, we chose to collaborate more extensively with external value-adding service providers, transitioning all systems to cloud solutions and enhancing in-house agile software processes. We partnered with Tuum for the core banking system, Salv for payment monitoring and Salesforce for customer management. During this time, we have also built a considerable engineering team in the UK,” added Kilu.

LHV Bank, a member of major UK and EU payment schemes, connects over 200 global Banking Services clients with the traditional banking world. Through LHV Bank’s robust BaaS offering, these clients serve over ten million customers, accessing a potential clientele of 500 million across the UK and Europe.

As a result of this transition, the LHV Bank will handle all the GBP payments for its Banking Services customers. Meanwhile, LHV Bank will continue processing EUR payments without changes.

LHV Bank is a licensed bank owned by LHV Group and is under the supervision of the UK financial regulators. Alongside its new banking system, the bank is preparing to implement a new loan system and plans to begin attracting deposits soon.