Powerful backend solutions for a European fintech leader
Creating an online banking platform for corporations and startups
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
