The Baltic FinTech ecosystem is changing fast. We have officially moved from the experimental “wild west” of early-stage startups into an era of mature, heavily regulated financial institutions. In Latvia, AS INDEXO Banka recently made history by securing the first new banking license issued since the country joined the Eurozone. Mintos, managing over €800 million in assets, is applying for its own ECB banking license to unlock deposit-based funding. Meanwhile, the crypto landscape is undergoing a massive compliance pressure. The EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation has forced the issue; in Lithuania, operating without a MiCA license has been illegal since January 2026.
Founders and CEOs are celebrating these milestones, and rightly so. Surviving the scrutiny of the ECB or local regulators is a fantastic achievement. But here’s what I see as an insider who spends every day working with tech and executive talent across this region: the license is not the hard part. Finding the right people is. You can hire lawyers to handle the paperwork. You can’t hire your way out of a market where the right people simply don’t exist yet.
The Reality of Talent Pool
When a FinTech transitions into a fully licensed entity, the rules change overnight. MiCA, the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), and PSD3 are not just legal frameworks; they are mandates for very specific human capital. Suddenly, companies are required to have local Money Laundering Reporting Officers (MLROs), executive board members with proven track records in traditional finance, and IT security professionals who understand how to keep systems running when things go wrong.
Here is the reality of the market we are operating in: the talent pool has not grown at the same pace as the regulatory requirements. Because this talent is so scarce, compensation expectations have become the primary hurdle for over half of employers. Salaries are rising sharply across Europe.
Baltic salaries are lower, but the competition for the same small group of people is just as fierce. Across the Baltics, every newly licensed CASP, EMI, and digital bank is chasing the exact same tiny pool of local experts and paying a premium to get them.
Last chance: Get your tickets for Baltic Fintech Days May 13
The Solutions: How to Build Your Team in a Limited Talent Pool
To survive the talent crisis and scale successfully, founders need to fundamentally change how they view talent acquisition. Here is what the smartest companies are doing to solve the hiring problem:
1. Treat Hiring as a Regulatory Project and Start Early
The smartest companies engage with regulators like Latvijas Banka 12 to 15 months before their planned submission. During this pre-licensing phase, you must recruit key functions early because the regulator will check their CVs. If you wait until the last minute to find your MLRO or executive board members, your application will take longer.
2. Build From Within
If the senior talent pool is exhausted, you must create your own. Take a calculated risk: hire adaptable junior talent or candidates with transferable skills, and invest in fast, structured development to accelerate their growth.
By leveraging existing industry certifications and providing in-house training, you can build a loyal, custom-trained pipeline of experts instead of fighting bidding wars for the same dozen senior professionals.
3. Rethink the Total Compensation
In a highly competitive market, a good base salary is no longer enough to win top talent. The total offer, your compensation package and what it includes, is what secures the hire. Beyond the salary, candidates evaluate the flexibility of your work conditions. Furthermore, offering shared financial success through stock option plans proves that you view your compliance and tech staff as vital partners in the company’s growth.
4. Invest in Employer Branding
Candidates today want to know how well-known and trustworthy a company is before they accept an offer. A strong employer brand is often the deciding factor. If you are a foreign company entering the Baltics, leveraging the appeal of the “unknown”, offering professionals the autonomy to build a department from the ground up, can be very attractive. Investing in your employer brand and visibility before you start hiring builds trust, reducing the costs and time spent on recruitment.
5. Stop Bringing Compliance in at the Last Minute
Retention is just as important as recruitment. A common theme among successful FinTechs is that they do not treat compliance purely as a final administrative checkpoint. If your product team builds a feature and hands it to the MLRO right before launch, forcing them to say “no” to protect the license, you create a toxic, burnout-inducing dynamic. To retain these professionals, you must bring them in at the product design phase. Give them the autonomy to act as strategic partners who help build fast, customer-friendly onboarding flows.
6. The Latvian central bank is approachable and willing to speak directly with founders, engage them early and discuss your specific business, as requirements vary by case. Consider your existing HQ talent to identify skill gaps, and remember language needs aren’t always limited to the local language. These discussions can also clarify pathways for relocating talent to Latvia.
7. Start building your compliance talent pipeline now: conduct targeted market research across Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia to map fintechs, banks and license holders, define clear MLRO/AML role profiles and required certifications, and monitor regulatory and funding signals that predict hiring demand. Use local networks and industry events to source passive candidates, tag skills and create tailored assessment kits and interview scorecards. Position your employer around regulatory challenge, autonomy and tech-enabled compliance, document relocation and payroll options, and maintain a regular cadence of outreach so you’re first to engage when licenses, funding rounds or product launches trigger immediate hiring needs.
Last chance: Get your tickets for Baltic Fintech Days May 13
What’s Coming Next
Three things are going to define the hiring market over the next two years.
First, cybersecurity demand is going up fast. DORA makes IT resilience a regulatory requirement across all licensed financial entities. The skills needed, ICT risk management, incident response, resilience testing, are already hard to find across Europe.
Second, MLRO scarcity is going to get worse before it gets better. Hundreds of crypto firms across the Baltics are working to meet MiCA standards right now. They all need the same local compliance professionals. If you have not started looking, you are already behind.
Third, and most importantly: the companies that will be in the strongest position are the ones investing in talent development today. The MLRO or Head of Compliance you need in two years is probably already working somewhere in your market as a junior compliance analyst or risk associate. Find them now, invest in their growth, and you will not be competing for them later at twice the price.
The Bottom Line
The Baltics are holding a winning hand, and the data proves it. In Latvia alone, the ecosystem has grown to 126 domestic fintech companies that generated nearly €372 million in combined turnover last year. In addition, over 100 international companies are currently exploring Latvia as their EU base. Latvijas Banka granted non-bank payment service providers direct access to its electronic clearing system (EKS) and SEPA. This infrastructure will attract more companies, making the competition for talent even fiercer.
However, the regulator isn’t going to build your product, they aren’t going to secure your systems against cyberattacks, and they aren’t going to scale your revenue. Your people are. If you aren’t treating talent acquisition with the exact same urgency, budget, and strategic focus as your legal application, you are already behind. Stop hunting for unicorns and start building a resilient team with the talent that actually exists.
