solarisBank AG

solarisBank offers the first banking platform to empower finance pioneers.

Innovation presentation

For decades banking services have been locked up in banks, forcing companies willing to offer financial services to work with uniform products offered by traditional banks not fitting to their business model. With the unbundling of finance, not only fintechs but all digital players strive to integrate financial products into their value chain. But due to stringent legal and regulatory requirements, hardly any (fin)tech firm can operate without relying on banking partners. Until now, these agile startups or tech companies were dependent on lengthy and cost-intensive analog setup processes with traditional banks.

solarisBank fills this gap as a partner for companies in the fast-growing digital economy and offers a unique, custom built, technology platform, supported with a full banking license. With this API accessible banking platform solarisBank can offer single banking modules with which the partners can built their ideal financial solution. This already includes modules like account and transaction services, compliance and trust solutions as well as online loans. The banking as a platform approach also allows solarisBank to integrate third parties for instance in the fields of Know your customer (KYC) processes, eSignature or scoring in the platform. The opening to third parties, offering partners the best products possible not just the ones built by yourself, is diametrically different to traditional banks and one strength of the solarisBank approach. The platformification of banking creates not only scalability but a true network effect between all companies willing to engange.

Uniqueness of the project

solarisBank is the first modular banking platform for digital business worldwide. The consequent approach to take banking out of the institution ‘bank’ and offer it as modular bricks to all sorts of digital companies is completely unique in the market and hasn’t been offered by anyone yet. Enabling digital companies to offer the exact financial products their customers could need – like digital and paperless loans, credit card or identification products – will disrupt the banking market since it empowers numerous business to become financial players themselves. It also creates an opportunity for banks to digitally transform with solarisBank without rebuilding their complete infrastructure. Being regulated exactly like any other bank, solarisBank can work as a missing link between digital companies already connected to the platform and traditional banks, making business happen which before was technologically impossible. Therefore solarisBank relies 100% on a state-of-the-art tech infrastructure offered through APIs.

The Reason Behind

The connection between banks and their customers is broken. People don’t think of banks anymore when they need a certain financial product. They don’t even think of banking products per se – they simply look for the best solution in the market for a financial demand they have. In contrast to banks, many fintechs and digital companies operate with this exact customer centricity – not selling their uniform product but reacting on customer demands. They would also be ideal to offer financial products. But most fintech companies require close cooperation with banking institutions to enable their core business. However, traditional banks do not have the necessary technology nor the processes to meet the growing demand. More established digital companies which like to broaden their business model by including financial services need banking partners as well. But currently no bank is specialized on enabling digital companies as financial players through an easy plug and play integration via APIs.

Results

As described above, since the launch in March in 2016 solarisBank has received 200+ inbound leads creating a partner pipeline valid for 2016 as well as 2017. So far five companies have been onboarded – from early stage fintechs such as Cringle or Kontist to very established digital players like AutoScout24 and fashioncheque. This led to solarisBank being revenue generating since the first month while reaching a seven digit revenue in the first year (2016).

With AutoScout24 the first first friction and paperless credit application process for consumer loans was established in the German market, offering AutoScout24 customers the possibility to apply for a car loan within the AutoScout24 app in just 10 minutes without any paperwork or unnecessary delays.