24.08.2023
On 22 August, at 23.59, the business of the UK branch of LHV Pank was transferred to LHV Bank. The change will affect clients of the LHV financial intermediaries business line in the UK. This was a major project, which was underpinned by LHV Bank obtaining a banking licence in early May and the recent permission from a UK court to transfer its business. This involved moving the servicing of sterling payments for UK business clients from the existing branch to the new bank. LHV Bank also took over the interfaces to the sterling payment systems and the contracts related to the servicing of sterling payments.
At the same time, LHV Bank introduced a new cloud-based banking support system and successfully migrated client-related data from the Estonian-based bank’s support system to LHV Bank’s UK-based system, which will make it easier for UK clients to connect to sterling payment systems, increase reliability, and enable better scaling of their business.
‘Preparations for the transfer of the business have been underway for over a year and a half. The whole project has been extremely complex in terms of both legal and IT development and management. In a year and a half, we have built what is essentially a completely new banking system. Today, clients and their data were migrated to the new system as well. This is the most modern banking system to date, which will give us a technological advantage for a long time to come,’ Erki Kilu, the CEO of LHV Bank, commented.
‘For the new system, we worked more closely with external service providers, moved all systems to the cloud, and transformed the work of our own development teams. We took the bank’s support system from Tuum, the payment monitoring system from Salv, and the client management system from Salesforce. During this time, we have also established a sizeable additional development team in the UK,’ Kilu added.
For financial intermediary clients, the change means that the service channels for sterling payments have changed from yesterday. Euro payments are made by clients in the same way as before, as they are still channelled through LHV Pank.
LHV Bank is a licensed bank belonging to the LHV Group and it is subject to UK financial supervision. In addition to the new banking system, the company is preparing to introduce a new lending system and to start involving deposits.
LHV Group is the largest domestic financial group and capital provider in Estonia. LHV Group’s key subsidiaries are LHV Pank, LHV Varahaldus, LHV Kindlustus, and LHV Bank Limited. The Group employs over 970 people. As of July, LHV’s banking services are being used by 404,000 clients, the pension funds managed by LHV have 127,000 active clients, and LHV Kindlustus protects a total of 161,000 clients. LHV Bank, a subsidiary of the Group, holds a banking licence in the UK and provides banking services to international financial technology companies, as well as loans to small and medium-sized enterprises.
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