Just arrived in Italy, Solarisbank has chosen to join the Fintech District community. We asked to Solarisbank AG to tell us about the objectives of the new challenge and the collaboration with our ecosystem.

How does Solarisbank stand out on the market and to whom it is aimed?

Solarisbank is Europe’s leading Banking-as-a-Serivce (BaaS) platform. Unlike other BaaS providers, we have a full German banking license and local IBANs in Spain, Italy and France too. Via APIs, partners can integrate Solarisbank’s modular banking services directly into their own product offering – We provide the technological infrastructure and the banking license needed, so our partners can: offer digital banking accounts and solutions, rely on identification services, provide flexible financing options, or even integrate crypto banking. We let companies focus on business and customer experience while we take care of banking rules, regulations and bureaucracy letting our partners embed banking services like interest-paying deposits and lending services (e.g. fixed-term deposits, overdrafts, instalment loans, credit lines etc.). Thanks to simple APIs, we can offer these solutions with a great speed to market and scale the financial services our client needs with no business interruption or distraction from the focus on clients and business.

How it is growing?

· Solarisbank is experiencing an exponential growth in terms of its product offering, partners, tech capabilities and also in terms of scope. This year 2021 after a successful and oversubscribed round the capitalization reached EUR 1.4 billion and Solarisbank become a fintech unicorn. The round was followed by the acquisition of Contis, a leading, profitable European payments fintech and Solarisbank became the undisputed pan-European Banking-as-a-Service leader.

Solarisbank drives the inevitable trend of embedded finance by enabling both global brands and fast-growing fintechs to integrate financial services into their own product offering via APIs. In addition, Solarisbank is one of the firsts banks 100% migrated on cloud: this sets a new European benchmark in terms of cost efficiency, scalability and service quality. The space for growth is enormous: according to the latest Solarisbank study made in cooperation with the Handelsblatt Research Institute, the potential for embedded finance and thus Banking-as-a-Service is immense. In Europe alone, nearly 500 million bank accounts are up for grabs in the next few years. Lightyear Capital estimates that the global market for embedded finance will grow from around EUR 22.5 billion at present to around EUR 230 billion by 2025.

Why it has chosen to develop in Italy and what it expects

Italy has enormous potential for Solarisbank; we present ourselves on the market with the aim of driving the growth of Banking-as-a-Service in the country and to help Italian companies to offer the best financial solutions to their customers and, ultimately, to support and accelerate the delicate post-pandemic recovery phase.

Thanks to the introduction of local IBANs in the four major European markets, together with the possibility of passporting our license, we are able to offer financial solutions throughout the European Economic Area. Speed and flexibility are therefore the elements that help us to grow with our current customers and to involve others – from the single-member companies to the multinationals – in this new era of financial services.

What kind of interest do you have in the fintech world and what do you expect from joining the FD community

Joining the Fintech District community is a great opportunity for us to connect with its ecosystem, collaborate and co-create a bright future. The Italian fintech community is one of the most impressive hubs of creativity and the network is well developed in terms of stakeholder engagement. Hence, it offers us the opportunity of collaborating with public institutions, investors, professionals, financial institutions, international innovation hubs, universities and corporations. On our side, based on our experience as leading BaaS platform in Europe, we’ll cooperate in increasing the knowledge of the fintech sector and to share best practices for new innovative solutions connecting both with startups and traditional operators/companies/banks in order to create new services and products and offer an international perspective of business development.