If a brand or non-bank organization, such as an automobile club that you initially joined for road rescue in case of breakdown, offers you a branded credit card or even loans, then this brand or organization is not handling such banking services themselves but is using “embedded finance”. A pioneer in this “banking as a service” business model is the fintech unicorn Solaris SE. If you have a Samsung phone and use Samsung Pay, then you are actually using Solaris. “Buy now, pay later” schemes are also a form of embedded finance, and even American Express uses Solaris for its own BNPL. Solaris is a fully licensed bank with e-money and brokerage licenses for operation on a pan-European level. The SE in the company name stands for Societas Europaea, which refers to a public company registered in accordance with the corporate law of the European Union. Solaris retains its HQ in the city in which it was founded in 2015, Berlin, and is substantially financed, counting Samsung, Visa, and MasterCard among its investors. Nonetheless, CEO Carsten Höltkemeyer and his team have now closed a series F funding round with €96M, as tech eu reports. One of the things Solaris intends to use the funds for is to onboard the credit card program of the massive ADAC, the Allgemeiner Deutscher Automobil-Club, the German automobile club with over 20 million members.
Read what Solaris CCO Jörg Diewald has to say about banking in Berlin here.
