IBS Journal April 2016
The initial idea was to obtain a banking license for our own purposes, but we soon realised
that the opportunity was considerably bigger than the initial problem. There wasn’t a single bank worldwide focused on technology partnerships with FinTechs and digital companies in general.
the existing providers (banks) and outmod- ed ways of doing business. When working together, traditional banks bring speed and agility of digital companies down to their level. This has caused the widespread loss of potential business throughout the industry. With our platform, we’re offering a horizontally-integrated bank with the sole purpose of enabling the actual products and services that people want to have. In addition to that, the disaggregation
of banking services is a megatrend in finance, confirmed by the emergence and success of pureplay offerings across the range of financial services. Pureplay compa- nies can better serve these customers when served by a pureplay banking layer, which is us. And we’re essentially saying to these companies, we’ve done the hard work of getting a banking license so you don’t have to. If you partner with solarisBank, it’s really simple to enable a financial solution, so come build on our platform and realise your vision.
IBS Journal: You’re a tech company with a banking license, looking to work with both banks and FinTech companies. How does that work exactly?
MW: Just to clarify, we don’t work with banks at the moment, nor do we have plans to do so in the future. We do banking for the digital economy. Therefore, we can work together with every company with a digital business model. When setting up a partnership, we try to strip away as many barriers as possible. We’ve built a state-of- the-art API, which means less complexity for your engineers and a fast, straightfor- ward integration with your systems. When we say that we’re a tech com-
pany with a banking license, it isn’t clever marketing; we move quickly and invest in best-in-class tech. If you want to offer your customers an additional service, you can simply pull it out of our toolbox without much hassle. If you need a tool that isn’t in our toolbox, we can also offer trusted third party services through our Solaris API.
IBS Journal: The solarisBank team have
experience of working in traditional banks and established technology vendors. How does the solarisBank experience compare with that? MW: The advantage is that our team is well-acquainted with what works in finance and what doesn’t. We’re familiar with
© IBS Intelligence 2016
which services, practices and processes are necessary to enable the financial solutions the digital economy demands, and which are bloated legacies of the analog era. With solarisBank, we started with a
blank canvas and built a company with the technology, processes and culture to provide our customers with banking ser- vices efficiently and effectively. None of us has ever worked in an environment where tech expertise, banking experience and entrepreneurship are brought together like at solarisBank. My fellow board member Andreas Bittner and I have worked in banks as well as tech companies. We’ve also founded companies ourselves. Half of our team works in tech. This is unique for a bank. We don’t think and work in silos. Therefore, in our office we place devel- opers right next to bankers. We’re a tech company with a banking license. You can see that in the way our team is set up.
IBS Journal: Your press release states that traditional banks have been a drag on the digital economy. And that during your preparations, you couldn’t identify a single bank worldwide that specialises exclusively on technology partnerships
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