LHVs presence in London will be more prominent and the focus on the banking services even sharper.
Last month, Estonian LHV announced that they will apply for a banking license in the UK. While they are already operated in the UK with the branch, now they will have also standalone banking license in the market. Although the branch is already fully operational and provides services in the UK, they believe that a dedicated bank in the UK will better serve long term ambition and the needs of international clients. According to their press release, LHV will create a fintech focused bank in the UK.
LHV has always focussed on supporting the growing financial technology space, contrary to most banks in the Baltic region, they welcomed the fintech community with open arms and provided them with influential and important financial services, essential for their operations. LHV takes pride in being one of the first banks that publicly supported emerging virtual assets companies; standing by the money remittance companies, that always experienced trouble trying to convince banks about their compliance and AML framework suitability, and placed trust on early-stage start-ups.
Today, LHV provides banking infrastructure to more than 130 global rapidly growing financial technology, payments, and virtual assets companies. Their annualized gross-processed payment volume now exceeds 90 billion Euros and now they are constantly working to add new innovative services and widening access to payments infrastructure. LHV Connect API is one of a kind and it allows instant Euro payments via SEPA Instant and Sterling transactions through Faster Payments in the UK. Today LHV processes 8% of total the SEPA real-time transaction volume.
According to LHV, there is three reason behind this decision: