title: LT — Payment Corridor Dynamics (W5) | World Payments Monitor canonical: https://payments.gi/jurisdictions/lithuania/w5/ ### W5 Payment Corridor Dynamics Probable re-verified 2026-10-18 · changed 2026-09-21 Lithuania's defining cross-border infrastructure is CENTROlink, the Bank of Lithuania's payment system giving EEA-licensed PSPs (including non-bank EMIs/PIs) direct access to SEPA Credit Transfer, SEPA Instant, TARGET2 and SWIFT, bypassing commercial correspondent banks. The corridor focus is EU/EEA SEPA euro flows, with remittance and cross-border PSPs (TransferGo, Wise, Paysera) serving Nordic, Western and Southern European corridors. Standing sub-brief · as of 27 June 2026 253 words · last cycle 2026-09-21 #### Payment Corridor Dynamics CENTROlink, operated by Lietuvos bankas, is the structural spine of the Lithuanian payments corridor. It provides SEPA Credit Transfer, SEPA Instant, TARGET2 and SWIFT access to all EEA-licensed PSPs, including non-bank EMIs and PIs. The participant community exceeds 200 institutions from over 20 countries, with more than 140 active participants, and the system also offers Verification of Payee and a Proxy Lookup Service. The throughput metrics define the corridor's trajectory: 379.7 million payments were processed in 2025, a 28.9% year-on-year increase, and instant payments accounted for 68% of all Lithuanian payments that year. The core access fact rests on the Bank of Lithuania's primary CENTROlink page, while the throughput figures are sourced from Tier-3 reporting and would be strengthened by primary statistical confirmation. CENTROlink is the structural moat of the Lithuanian fintech hub: direct central-bank SEPA access for non-banks, at sub-commercial fees, is the corridor's defining advantage and the operational reason the jurisdiction attracts the EU's largest population of non-bank payment licensees. The corridor is expanding, and its opening access direction underpins the broader market structure analysed in W6 and the correspondent-banking asymmetry analysed in W12. #### Outlook The W5 trajectory is escalating, with the LT-SEPA-EEA corridor recorded as expanding and its access direction opening. Forward interest lies in whether throughput growth continues at the 2025 pace and in how VoP and Proxy Lookup mature as corridor-level fraud and addressing controls. The primary watch item is corroboration of the 2025 throughput metrics against the Bank of Lithuania's own Payments Market Review. Periodic update · new data 2026-09-21 #### Payment Corridor Dynamics Transaction values processed through CENTROlink have exceeded €838 billion, with payment service providers from 20 countries using the platform. This corridor-scale figure, read alongside the 379.7-million-payment annual volume reported under operational resilience, indicates that CENTROlink functions as a genuine cross-border payment corridor for participating PSPs rather than a purely domestic clearing mechanism. The roughly two-thirds instant-payment share within CENTROlink's volume suggests the corridor dynamics here increasingly favour real-time settlement over batch-processed transfers. The corridor's structural significance is that it gives Lithuanian-licensed PSPs, and the broader community of 20-country participants using the platform, direct SEPA and instant-payment access without routing through a correspondent-banking chain. This is a meaningfully different corridor architecture from a jurisdiction reliant on commercial correspondent banks for cross-border settlement, and it is a factor likely to continue supporting Lithuania's attractiveness as a licensing and processing hub for PSPs seeking efficient euro-area corridor access. Watch whether the €838 billion transaction-value figure continues its growth trajectory in line with CENTROlink's participant and volume growth, and whether additional countries' PSPs join the 20-country user base in the next reporting period. **1 earlier distinct update(s)** Periodic update · new data 2026-09-08 #### Payment Corridor Dynamics CENTROlink, the Bank of Lithuania's payment system, processed 379.7 million payments in 2025, an increase of 28.9 percent year on year, with instant payments now accounting for 68 percent of total volume. This is a confirmed, primary-source data point evidencing continued strong growth in Lithuania's domestic and cross-border payment corridor activity, and the instant-payments share indicates the corridor is shifting decisively toward faster-payment rails rather than legacy batch processing. Compounding this growth in throughput, non-bank payment institutions and electronic money institutions gained direct access to the TARGET payment system from 6 October 2025. This is a structural market-access development for the corridor: it extends settlement-system participation beyond the traditional bank-only perimeter, allowing non-bank PIs and EMIs to settle directly rather than through a sponsoring bank intermediary, which has implications for settlement risk, cost, and speed for the non-bank segment of Lithuania's payments sector. Watch for continued CENTROlink volume and instant-payments-share growth in subsequent reporting periods, and for early evidence of how non-bank PIs and EMIs are utilising direct TARGET access in practice, which would clarify whether the structural access change is translating into measurable corridor-level effects. **Sources and findings (4 unique sources · R-3/R-4)** 1. [W5-E1] T1 Derived: Confirmed [in_force https://www.lb.lt/en/centrolink](https://www.lb.lt/en/centrolink) re-verified 2026-06-27 CENTROlink, operated by Lietuvos bankas, provides SEPA access for all EEA-licensed PSPs including banks, EMIs and PIs; the community has grown to more than 200 financial institutions from over 20 countries with more than 140 active participants, and offers add-on services such as Verification of Payee and a Proxy Lookup Service. 2. [W5-E2] T1 Derived: Confirmed [in_force https://www.lb.lt/en/news/centrolink-is-expanding-its-instant-payment-services](https://www.lb.lt/en/news/centrolink-is-expanding-its-instant-payment-services) re-verified 2026-06-27 The Bank of Lithuania offered instant payments via CENTROlink from 2017, and PSPs processing SEPA instant payments using TARGET2 services gained access to the TARGET Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS) platform; the Bank rejected several connection applications and disconnected institutions to keep the system to reliable participants. 3. [W5-E3] T3 Derived: Probable [in_force https://blog.voveid.com/lithuania-emi-pi-compliance-2026/](https://blog.voveid.com/lithuania-emi-pi-compliance-2026/) re-verified 2026-06-27 The Bank of Lithuania reported that 379.7 million payments were processed through CENTROlink in 2025, up 28.9% year-on-year, with instant payments making up 68% of all payments in Lithuania that year, and Verification of Payee introduced in CENTROlink during 2025. 4. [W5-E4] T3 Derived: Probable [in_force https://stripe.com/resources/more/payments-in-lithuania](https://stripe.com/resources/more/payments-in-lithuania) re-verified 2026-06-27 Cross-border payment specialists such as TransferGo, Paysera and Wise are leading providers serving Lithuania's corridors; as a euro-area SEPA member, euro-denominated cross-border transfers within the area are simplified under EU rules.