Solaris has gone live on ACI Worldwide's ACI Connetic platform to process its SEPA Instant payments.
The go-live concludes the first phase of Solaris' payments modernisation programme. The company plans to extend its use of ACI Connetic in later phases as part of a longer-term transformation of its payments infrastructure.
Regulation reshapes euro payments
The migration comes as instant transfers become the baseline for euro payments. Under the EU Instant Payments Regulation, payment service providers in the eurozone must be able to receive instant credit transfers and must price outgoing instant transfers no higher than standard credit transfers. They are also required to check the payee's name against the account details before the payer authorises a transaction.
Together, these obligations turn SEPA Instant from a premium option into routine volume. Transactions run around the clock and settle within seconds, and fraud screening has to take place inside that same processing window. For providers handling payments at scale, this places new demands on both capacity and risk controls.
ACI Connetic combines payments processing, fraud prevention, payments intelligence, and orchestration in a single cloud-native architecture. According to ACI Worldwide, this set-up allows a bank to add capacity and introduce new services without integrating separate systems.
Instant payments in an Embedded Finance model
Solaris holds a full German banking licence and provides accounts, cards, lending, and payments to fintechs, digital brands, and multinational companies that build financial products into their own customer offerings. Because these partners rely on Solaris to move funds on their behalf, instant payment capability is part of the service they procure from the company rather than an optional add-on.
Solaris selected ACI Connetic as the foundation of its payments modernisation strategy. Alongside its majority shareholder, SBI Group, the company has also outlined plans to develop its platform into pan-European financial infrastructure.
Thomas Warsop, president and CEO of ACI Worldwide, said that banks across Europe are rebuilding their payments operations around instant transfers, and that those moving fastest are treating it as a platform decision. Since Solaris processes payments for a wide network of partners, the official added, it needs infrastructure that can scale alongside them.
Steffen Jentsch, CEO of Solaris, described the go-live as a milestone in the evolution of the company's platform infrastructure. As Solaris develops into a Financial-Platform-as-a-Service provider, the official said, ACI Connetic is intended to support AI-driven, resilient payment processes that meet European regulatory standards expected by its partners and their customers.
Next steps
With the SEPA Instant migration complete, the focus shifts to the remaining phases of Solaris' payments modernisation. For the fintechs and brands operating on its platform, the consolidation of processing and fraud prevention onto one system is set to underpin the instant payment services they offer to their own customers. At the same time, the project also reflects the trend described by ACI Worldwide, in which European banks approach instant payments as a question of core platform architecture rather than an isolated product upgrade.
