Solaris Bank

Solaris holds a full German banking license as a CRR credit institution, granted in 2017, and is supervised by BaFin and the European Central Bank. The license covers deposits, current accounts, debit and credit cards, payment services and consumer loans. Customer deposits fall under the German Deposit Guarantee Act up to 100,000 euros, and passporting rights let Solaris offer these services in every EU and EEA country from Berlin.

A full bank can pay interest, grant an overdraft and lend its own money, which an e-money institution may not do. Solaris also ran an e-money business of its own, formerly known as Contis, and discontinued major parts of it on 20 September 2024 after losing key partners in difficult market conditions. The licensing rules that apply to every provider of banking as a service in Germany decide which of the two models a platform can run.

Solaris issues the ADAC credit card for the German motoring club since a program migration in September 2024, an example of embedded finance in Germany. In October 2026 Solaris added an instant access savings account for ADAC cardholders, after a soft launch that reached 50,000 of them. The Berlin app Tomorrow has worked with Solaris since its founding in 2018 on current accounts, shared accounts, overdrafts and debit cards, and it introduced savings accounts with Solaris in February 2025.

For Samsung Pay in Germany, Solaris and Visa issue a virtual debit card in Samsung branding that links to almost any German bank account. For the business software provider Lexware, which serves about 500,000 entrepreneurs and small businesses, Solaris built a business account with a Visa Business Debit card that connects to the accounting product Lexware Office. Solaris also issues and processes the debit card of Bitpanda across the European Economic Area, and Coinbase and Kontist appear among the partners of Solaris as well.

On 3 February 2025 Solaris closed a Series G round of 140 million euros led by SBI Group and Boerse Stuttgart Group, in which the Tokyo-based SBI Group became majority shareholder. SBI completed the German ownership control procedure on 25 March 2025, and at the same time Katharina Gehra replaced Burkhard Eckes on the supervisory board of Solaris. The Series F round of March 2024 had raised 96 million euros in equity plus financial guarantees of up to 100 million euros, which paid for the migration of the ADAC credit card program.

The new owners arrived after a restructuring, because in September 2024 Solaris cut jobs and introduced a leaner management structure. At the end of 2025 Steffen Jentsch, previously chief information officer at flatexDEGIRO, succeeded Carsten Höltkemeyer as CEO, with Matthias Heinrich as chief risk officer. In March 2026 Solaris announced its conversion into an AI-native bank, and Yoshitaka Kitao, chairman and CEO of SBI Holdings, called Solaris the central European building block of the group.

BaFin first acted after a special audit: on 27 December 2021 it set additional own funds requirements (in German) for what was then Solarisbank AG, citing numerous deficiencies in its business organization. BaFin also appointed a special representative to the bank by a decision of 24 January 2022. On 16 December 2022 BaFin ordered Solaris SE to fix its risk management and money laundering prevention (in German), including address checks at onboarding and transfer and cash withdrawal limits for certain accounts. The same order barred Solaris from new cooperation partnerships, new subsidiaries and new holdings without the approval of the supervisor.

On 7 March 2024 BaFin fined Solaris 6.5 million euros (in German) because the bank had systematically filed suspicious activity reports on money laundering too late. In July 2024 the supervisor set deadlines for fixing deficiencies (in German) in money laundering prevention, reporting, outsourcing management and IT, threatened a coercive fine and extended the mandate of the special representative. On 13 June 2025 BaFin imposed fines totaling 500,000 euros (in German) because Solaris had exceeded the large exposure limit of the CRR several times between January 2022 and March 2024. The reporting and due diligence duties behind these orders apply to every bank under the rules on anti-money laundering in Germany.

Solaris entered crypto custody in December 2019 with the subsidiary Solaris Digital Assets GmbH, which offered partners a white-label custody service through an API and planned to apply for a BaFin crypto custody license in 2020. In November 2020 the crypto banking app Bitwala chose this service to hold bitcoin and ether for its customers, with private keys managed through the multi-party computation technology of Curv. At that time Solaris Digital Assets had applied for the license and worked under a provisional crypto custody license.

Since a partnership announced in May 2024, Solaris uses the custody infrastructure of Bitpanda Technology Solutions for cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether. Partners of Solaris get access to savings plans, asset swaps and staking through that setup, a form of crypto as a service in which a licensed provider holds the coins behind the app. Boerse Stuttgart Group, co-lead of the Series G round, has worked with Solaris for years in the digital and crypto business it runs as Boerse Stuttgart Digital. The partners of Solaris also include the crypto exchange BSDEX and the Bison app, both from the Boerse Stuttgart Group.

Solaris is a German credit institution with a full banking license that sells its services mainly to other companies, which pass them on to their own customers. A customer of Tomorrow, the ADAC credit card or Samsung Pay holds the account or card at Solaris SE, while the app and the brand belong to the partner.

Solaris SE has issued the ADAC credit card since the program moved to it in September 2024. With the EuroAbruf feature, cardholders can move up to 5,000 euros from their credit limit to their reference account by SEPA Instant, and since October 2026 they can open a savings account next to the card.

Deposits at Solaris are covered by the statutory German deposit guarantee up to 100,000 euros, because Solaris holds a CRR banking license and not an e-money license. An e-money institution has to safeguard customer funds at another bank instead, which can delay repayment if that institution fails.

Solaris grants consumer loans and offers Splitpay, a buy now, pay later product that partners can add to a card. In Samsung Pay, users can split purchases above 100 euros for up to 90 days after buying and repay them over up to 24 months, while Solaris runs scoring, risk management and loan origination.