Revolut had received its European banking licence from the Bank of Lithuania in 2021, and its growth in the years that followed was so rapid that, by the end of 2024, it had overtaken every incumbent in the country by total assets. Revolut Bank UAB finished 2024 with roughly 20300 million euros in assets and a market share of about 32.8 percent, putting it just ahead of Swedbank’s 19600 million euros and 31.7 percent share. SEB trailed at roughly 15200 million euros. The scale of this reversal is worth sitting with for a moment, because five or six years ago, Revolut barely registered in the Lithuanian market. In 2023, when the Bank of Lithuania added Revolut to the ECB’s direct supervision list, it was the third largest bank in the country at around 19 percent market share, well behind Swedbank and SEB. The jump from third to first happened in about eighteen months.

The caveat that incumbent banks raise immediately, and they are not wrong to raise it, is that Revolut’s Lithuanian asset base includes depositors from across thirty European Economic Area countries, since the Lithuanian entity is the group’s EU banking hub. Ingrida Daunaravičienė, Revolut’s communications head, has acknowledged this directly, pointing out that Revolut serves around 650000 Lithuanian clients but also tens of millions of customers across the continent. Artea, the rebranded Šiaulių bankas, argues that once you strip out those pan European assets, it actually looks more competitive in the domestic market than the headline numbers suggest. This is a fair point, and a financial analyst at Kreditai.INFO puts it plainly: “The ranking by consolidated assets tells you something about Revolut’s European scale, but if you want to understand competition in Lithuania specifically, you have to look at where the deposits actually came from, and Revolut has been attracting Lithuanian clients at a pace that no incumbent should feel comfortable dismissing.” Retail customers in Lithuania grew twenty four percent in 2024 alone, business clients fifty seven percent, and youth accounts forty seven percent. Those are not the growth rates of a service people use once and then ignore.

The competitive pressure from Revolut’s expansion, combined with the regulators’ public statements about deposit rate passthrough, started to produce real movement in what Lithuanian banks offered savers. By the third quarter of 2023, the Bank of Lithuania was reporting that banks across the country were paying annual interest of between 3.5 and 4.3 percent on one year time deposits, up from the near zero levels that had persisted just a couple of years before. The share of Lithuanian household savings sitting in time deposits, rather than in current accounts earning nothing, nearly doubled over the course of nine months in 2023, from thirteen percent at the start of that year to around twenty five percent by the third quarter. People were paying attention and moving their money, which is exactly the consumer behavior that forces banks to compete. A ten thousand euro deposit that earned twenty euros in those years would have earned somewhere between 350 and 430 euros on a one year time deposit by mid 2023, which is not a small difference for an ordinary household.

The traditional banks did eventually move, though the timing and enthusiasm varied considerably. Luminor and Artea were generally quicker to raise deposit rates than the two Swedish owned giants, which some observers attributed to those smaller institutions having less captive deposit bases and therefore more to lose if customers started moving money. Swedbank in particular took pressure from multiple directions simultaneously: the Bank of Lithuania was criticising its deposit rate passthrough, the government and finance ministry were working on a solidarity contribution for banks earning windfall profits from rate hikes, and customers with smartphones could see in thirty seconds that competitors were offering substantially more. I find it difficult to argue that any of this would have moved as fast without Revolut sitting there as a visible, accessible alternative. Before Revolut had a full banking licence and a deposit product, a Lithuanian saver who wanted a better rate had to either navigate a credit union or set up accounts with foreign banks through platforms most ordinary people had never heard of. Revolut already lived on people’s phones.

The solidarity contribution itself is worth noting because it reflects a wider political reckoning with how banks behaved during the rate cycle. Lithuania’s central bank estimated that credit institutions could earn profits exceeding one billion euros in 2024 from the combination of high rates and excess liquidity, and the finance ministry responded by proposing a temporary solidarity tax expected to raise around 510 million euros from financial institutions over two years. Swedbank earned the largest profit among Lithuanian banks in the first nine months of 2025 at 261.5 million euros, down marginally from a year earlier, and as of early 2026, it remains the most profitable institution in the country. SEB followed at 218 million in that same period. Revolut’s holding entity, meanwhile, more than doubled its profit, rising roughly 2.1 times to around 155 million euros. The incumbents are still very profitable. The difference is that savers got something out of this rate cycle that they have not historically received, which is a meaningful interest payment on money sitting in a bank account.

What actually happens next to deposit rates is tied directly to ECB policy, and the broader rate environment, and both of those are moving in the direction of lower rates rather than higher ones. The average deposit interest rate across Lithuania had already come down from its peak to around 2.15 percent by mid 2025 as ECB cuts worked through the system, and by early 2026, that downward drift is continuing. Banks that raised rates to defend their deposit bases are now under less pressure to maintain those levels. The question for Lithuanian savers in 2026 is whether the competitive landscape created by Revolut’s presence means that incumbents will be slower to lower rates than they were to raise them, which would be a reversal of the pattern the regulator once called obscene. Credit unions, which have historically offered more competitive savings rates than commercial banks and currently hold around a quarter of household deposits, may also play a larger role if rate compression accelerates and savers start hunting basis points again. For now, a saver who moved ten thousand euros into a one year time deposit in 2023 or 2024 got more from their bank than at any point in the previous decade. Whether that persists through the next rate cycle is the real question, and the answer probably depends on whether the Lithuanian market ends up actually competitive or just competitive for a year or two while everyone adjusts to a new entrant.