Solaris, a Germany-based Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) provider, has announced a comprehensive strategic repositioning, setting out plans to transform into what it describes as one of Europe's first AI-native banks.
The announcement comes less than three months after a new management team took office under CEO Steffen Jentsch, and is backed by majority shareholder SBI Group, the Japan-based financial conglomerate.
The strategy builds on Solaris' German full banking licence, its API-based embedded finance platform, and ten years of experience in the BaaS market. The company intends to develop its platform into a pan-European financial infrastructure, with banking processes rebuilt and largely automated using artificial intelligence. Solaris is developing an operating model in which AI agents handle operational processes while human oversight remains responsible for control and governance.
Business model and partnership focus
As part of the transformation, Solaris will align its business model around standardised and reusable modules within its financial platform and redesign key end-to-end processes. A central focus is on existing partnerships, including ADAC and Boerse Stuttgart Group, for which Solaris is developing data and AI-driven financial services. For partners, the AI-native architecture is expected to deliver faster product development, greater scalability, and continued integration through existing API infrastructure.
Furthermore, Solaris framed the timing of the transformation in the context of the EU AI Act and the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), describing Europe's regulatory environment as creating the framework necessary for this step.
Commenting on the news, Steffen Jentsch, CEO of Solaris, said the company is taking the next logical step from cloud-based API banking by combining that infrastructure with AI and rebuilding banking processes from the ground up. Yoshitaka Kitao, Representative Director and CEO of SBI Holdings, described Solaris as SBI's central European building block, a fully licensed German bank with API-based architecture providing access to the European Economic Area.
