For years, Guru Pay had reached the Bank of Lithuania’s CENTROlink through an intermediary. The arrangement worked well enough for a young payments company. By 2024, however, the business had outgrown it.
With a new core platform under development and customers increasingly expecting instant payments, Guru Pay wanted greater control over its euro payment operations. It chose to connect directly to CENTROlink through Inventi, leaving the specialised work of running and maintaining the connection to a team that already knew it inside out.
At a glance
The challenge: An intermediary setup that limited payment visibility and left Guru Pay dependent on another institution’s processes and timetable.
The decision: Move to direct CENTROlink access without building and maintaining the entire connectivity layer in-house.
The outcome: SEPA Instant, end-to-end payment visibility and a more resilient setup, with ongoing technical and scheme changes handled by Inventi.
A payments business built around an overlooked customer
Guru Pay was founded in Vilnius in 2018 with a particular kind of customer in mind.
Online gaming companies, e-commerce businesses and other firms in fast-moving digital industries often struggled to find a bank willing to understand how they operated. Guru Pay saw an opportunity to serve them differently, combining dedicated IBANs and reliable payment services with the personal attention of a boutique financial institution.
The business has since grown well beyond that original niche. Today, its customers include other EMIs, payment institutions, PSPs, crypto and digital asset businesses, and online merchants. Many use Guru Pay’s API to manage their payment operations, alongside its EUR accounts, SEPA transfers and card acquiring services.
One thing has remained constant: euro payments sit at the heart of the business.
As Agnė Kavaliauskaitė, Head of Payments & Operations at Guru Pay, explains:
“If SEPA works smoothly, our customers don’t think about us at all, and that’s exactly the goal.”
For customers accustomed to moving money around the clock, that is a fairly demanding standard. They expect payments to arrive in seconds, regardless of what happens behind the scenes.
When the intermediary became a constraint
Guru Pay’s euro payments had always passed through CENTROlink, but the company did not have its own direct connection.
In its early years, reaching the system through an intermediary made sense. As Guru Pay grew, the trade-offs became harder to ignore.
Once a payment left its platform, the team had limited visibility into what happened next. Introducing changes or new features also meant working around another institution’s processes and priorities.
“We depended on someone else’s processes for the most important part of our product,” Agnė recalls.
The turning point came in 2024.
Guru Pay was rebuilding its core platform, and SEPA Instant was becoming an expectation rather than a feature customers might ask for. It was an opportunity to rethink the infrastructure underneath the business.
Direct CENTROlink access would give Guru Pay greater visibility, fewer operational dependencies and more freedom to develop its payment services on its own terms.
There was, however, the question of who would build and maintain the connection.
Building the connection was only half the problem
Guru Pay considered developing its CENTROlink connectivity in-house.
It was technically possible. But keeping such a connection running is a different proposition from building it in the first place.
SEPA scheme rulebooks change. ISO 20022 message formats are updated. Certificates need renewing, Bank of Lithuania releases require testing, and incidents need investigating. None of that work ends when the connection goes live.
For Guru Pay, assigning engineers to these tasks indefinitely made little sense.
“That isn’t where we create value for our customers,” says Agnė.
Inventi offered a way to separate the two responsibilities. Guru Pay could retain control of its core platform and payment operations, while Inventi looked after the specialist CENTROlink connectivity layer.
The choice rested on experience as much as technology. Inventi was already operating CENTROlink connections for other financial institutions, understood the Lithuanian regulatory environment and could respond when something needed attention.
There was also a practical advantage in working with one provider across several requirements. Beyond SEPA, Guru Pay uses Inventi’s PLAIS connector and regulatory reporting solution.
A clear division of work from the start
The project began in spring 2024, alongside Guru Pay’s wider core platform rebuild.
Inventi started by setting out what each team needed to do. The Bank of Lithuania’s onboarding requirements were divided into tasks, with a test environment connected to CENTROlink established as an early milestone.
Guru Pay’s developers concentrated on connecting their new core platform to the Inventi API. The team also handled the regulatory obligations that remained with Guru Pay as the participating institution.
In April 2024, Guru Pay received SEPA Instant approval from CENTROlink and added it to the implementation scope.
The clearly divided responsibilities helped the teams avoid spending time figuring out who was supposed to handle what. For Guru Pay, that mattered almost as much as the technical connection itself.
The work that nobody wants to think about
Going direct gave Guru Pay something it had been missing: a clear view of payments from end to end, without relying on another institution’s processes to operate its core service.
SEPA Instant was the more visible improvement for customers. Much of the value since then has been less conspicuous.
During planned maintenance or technical problems on Guru Pay’s side, incoming payments have been queued by Inventi until Guru Pay’s systems were available again. Processing then resumed without lost payments or manual reconciliation.
Regulatory and technical changes offer another example.
In early 2025, the Bank of Lithuania introduced changes affecting CENTROlink liquidity and safeguard accounts. New documentation arrived, along with testing requirements. Inventi handled the necessary adaptations and tests, leaving Guru Pay with a coordinated exercise rather than a separate development project.
Later releases, including changes to payment purpose codes and the introduction of Verification of Payee, followed much the same pattern.
The arrangement also covers the smaller, recurring responsibilities: connection monitoring, certificate renewals and communication with the Bank of Lithuania during scheme-level incidents. When CENTROlink schedules maintenance or experiences an outage, Inventi provides the information Guru Pay needs to keep its own customers informed.
It is not particularly glamorous work. It is, however, the sort of work that becomes very important when nobody is taking care of it.
Direct access, without doing everything yourself
For Guru Pay, direct SEPA access has meant gaining more control over its most important payment rail while keeping its engineers focused on the platform and services customers actually use.
The connection itself was only the beginning. Maintaining it through technical releases, scheme changes and the occasional interruption is an ongoing responsibility, one Guru Pay chose not to turn into an internal discipline.
Agnė has straightforward advice for other EMIs considering the same move:
“Do it, but be honest about what ‘direct’ means in practice. The connection itself is the easy part. The ongoing scheme changes, testing, and incident handling are what take up a team’s time.”
The connection gives Guru Pay greater control over its SEPA operations, with Inventi managing the technical integration and ongoing updates.
For its customers, the result should be much simpler: payments that work, without much reason to think about how.
About Guru Pay
Founded in Vilnius in 2018 and licensed as an electronic money institution by the Bank of Lithuania in 2019, Guru Pay provides payment services to businesses operating across borders. Its customers include financial institutions, PSPs, crypto and digital asset companies, online gaming businesses and e-commerce merchants. Its services include EUR accounts, dedicated IBANs, SEPA and SEPA Instant payments, card acquiring and API-based payment operations.
About Inventi
Inventi provides payment and regulatory infrastructure for banks, EMIs and payment institutions. Its Payment Gateway enables direct SEPA connectivity through CENTROlink and EKS, alongside SWIFT and TARGET Services connectivity. Inventi also provides specialised solutions for regulatory reporting, Verification of Payee and PLAIS integration.
