banking in Lithuania

The Nordic-Baltic financial group Nordea and the Norwegian bank DNB have agreed to merge their subsidiaries in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, the banks have announced.

The mortgage market in Lithuania is showing strong signs of recovery, the Bank of Lithuania says. Growing income, low interest rates and optimistic outlook encourages people to take out loans in order to buy properties.

Lithuanian commercial banks may have to accumulate additional capital buffers for risk control, said Vitas Vasiliauskas, the head of Bank of Lithuania, at the Lithuanian Banking Association conference.

Swedbank has been given the go-ahead by Lithuania’s Competition Council to take over the retail banking business of Danske Bank in Lithuania.

Šiaulių bankas was rated as the best bank in Lithuania in 2015 by the international business and financial magazine Global Finance which has been listing the best banks of the Central and Eastern European growing markets for 23 years.

The Lithuanian parliament is to consider a bill allowing mergers of credit unions. The Bank of Lithuania says the measure would improve the credit unions' viability and introduce new players in the country's financial market.

Scandinavian banks are no longer interested in expanding lending in Lithuania due to falling returns, said Stasys Kropas, the president of the Association of Lithuanian Banks.

The Lithuanian Central Bank is to introduce new rules to ensure that interest rates on fixed rate loans remain the same over the whole period of the loan.

Profit margins of major banks in Lithuania have fallen by about one fifth in 2015, a result of one-off factors like Lithuania's accession to the euro zone and quantitative easing policies that have cut interest rates, Verslo Žinios reports.

Swedbank is setting up a services centre in Lithuania which will create 400 new jobs, lrytas.lt reports.