Backend Solutions for Solaris, Europe’s Leading Banking-As-A-Service Company
Creating an online banking platform for corporations and startups.
About this project
Solarisbank is a Banking-as-a-Service platform. A fully customizable and secure API is crucial for Solarisbank to offer their services. Netguru supported the client so that third parties can use full and secure digital banking solutions like payments, e-money, lending, bank accounts, KYC (Know Your Customer) services, and algorithmic scoring.
Solarisbank is a Berlin-based 400-person fintech company making waves at a pace rarely seen before in the financial industry.
It took Solarisbank less than three years to build the platform, scale up a team, and raise almost €100m in funding with investments from Arvato, BBVA, Visa, Lakestar, and ABN AMRO's Digital Impact Fund. In 2020, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, Solarisbank successfully raised Series C funding and launched major products with Visa, Samsung, and American Express.
Banking platform for the new era
Solarisbank is a banking platform with a full banking license, which enables companies to offer their own financial products. Partners can access Solarisbank modules in the fields of e-money, instant credit, lending, and digital banking as well as services from third-party providers integrated with the platform via an API. Thus, Solarisbank creates a banking ecosystem for fintechs, established digital companies, and banks.
Fostering growth
As a result of rapid growth, Solarisbank faced a major challenge: keeping the pace of development up with the ambitions of a leading tech company. That’s when they decided to partner with Netguru to take advantage of our teams of highly skilled engineers and extensive experience helping companies become remote-friendly.
Partnership with Netguru
Netguru leveraged Solarisbank’s offerings in the following ways:
Help in expanding API services;
Assembly and introduction of a well-oiled, standalone team to work on a platform for handling debit cards (Ruby);
Strengthening the team responsible for the consumer loan products engine (Elixir);
Introducing test automation;
Sharing remote work best practices.
Mastering remote-first development
With over 10 years of experience managing remote teams, Netguru was able to guide Solarisbank through the process of becoming a remote-first company. We shared the best practices and processes of implementing remote work, introducing effective communication on Slack, managing projects, as well as other strategies needed to run teams scattered across the world.
Having a tech-driven business model and a digital mindset allowed us to survive 2020 relatively unharmed. We were already a remote-first organization before the pandemic, working with Netguru based in Poland and us in Berlin, so going 100% online was not a difficult transition.
Hima Mandali
CTO at Solarisbank
Partnership on a continuous growth path
A fully customizable and secure API is crucial for Solarisbank to offer their services. Netguru supported Solarisbank so that third parties can use full and secure digital banking solutions like payments, e-money, lending, bank accounts, KYC (Know Your Customer) services, and algorithmic scoring.
Specifically, Netguru implemented several solutions that are now helping Solarisbank to expand or improve their products:
Test automation, enabling continuous delivery crucial for the smooth running of long-term projects.
Collaboration on the Dunning project, automating the process of client notifications in case of a negative account balance.
An API for Mastercard: Netguru helped implement a new API for ordering, managing, and controlling Mastercard credit cards.
Our collaboration continues with work on advancing the backend while Solarisbank keeps onboarding new clients and providing a state-of-the-art banking platform.
Our cooperation with Netguru is a true partnership. Whenever we faced challenges this year, we could rely on Netguru for our urgent staffing needs and time-critical deliverables. The Netguru team has gone above and beyond any expectations of what a strong and reliable partner can be. It's a pleasure to continue our growth with such an outstanding tech company.
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