News & Press

• Agency Banking enables LHV clients full ownership and operational flexibility over their account and payment infrastructure
• LHV is the only bank granting an API access to real-time Faster Payments, SEPA (via STEP2 Clearing House) and SEPA Instant (via RT1 instant payment system)
• The new multi-jurisdictional and fully modular offering helps clients ‘Brexit proof’ their customer-facing propositions

LHV Banking Services (‘LHV’ or the ‘Bank’), the leading provider of payment infrastructure to Financial Intermediaries and regulated FinTechs, is now offering full Agency Banking Services to its clients and the wider payments industry. The Bank has extended its product suite to the full spectrum of financial intermediaries and will therefore allow them to gain a competitive advantage by delivering bespoke propositions

LHV’s Agency Banking provides a certified gateway to central clearing system, enabling our clients, FinTechs and other financial institutions to have access to an affordable, alternative method of delivering mainstream payment processing capabilities to their end-customers.

LHV Agency Banking is particularly important to financial intermediaries and large scale payment service providers who want to completely own their main account infrastructure (i.e. sort codes / bank identifier codes), as well as IBAN generation. The unique solution connects clients’ systems to real-time euro and pound processing without the significant costs or lengthy onboarding procedures of becoming direct scheme members. All the while these institutions can appear as UK and Euro equivalent clearing banks in their own right.

Large scale financial intermediaries can future proof and utilise this multi-jurisdiction offering across the UK and Eurozone and thus maintain an agile offering to its customers regardless of any volatile macroeconomic events. In a FinTech industry first, LHV customers now have indirect membership into FPS, STEP2 and RT1 via one banking relationship and one Application Programming Interface – ‘LHV Connect'.

This next generation banking solution, in conjunction with LHV’s real-time payment-as-a-service offering, places the Bank at the forefront in democratising embedded financial services to the wider international FinTech community.

Andres Kitter, Head of LHV Banking Services, said, “The new capabilities are a significant milestone for our business as existing and prospective customers can deploy account and payment services for rapid market access. Agency Banking is the natural progression within our Banking-as-a-service offering but is also an important step in providing our customers with greater choice in how they wish to operate. LHV has always seen FinTechs as allies and we will continue to expand our offering with this at the forefront of our ethos.”

Looking to 2021, LHV has already announced it will apply for a UK banking licence to clearly separate from AS LHV Pank’s current business activities in Estonia. The Bank will further build on its Agency Banking offering by joining Bacs (for paying bank and direct debit origination), SEPA Direct Debit, as well as a longer term plan of joining additional regional real-time payment networks.

LHV Banking Services will be holding a public webinar for customers and industry participants with further product details in December.