(18 July 2016 – Germany) Berlin-based mobile payments firm Cringle is using the banking license and Sepa Access API of compatriot solarisbank to launch its P2P payments platform across the Euro zone.
Founded just 2 years ago, Cringle enables users to send and receive money from any German bank account using just a mobile number.
The startup plans to piggy-back off solarisBank, and launch in Austria later this year, and then gradually expand in to other European countries by the first quarter of 2017.
“While others have seen Sepa as burden, we have always seen it as an opportunity to build great products. It will be hard for purely national solutions to survive in the globalised fintech ecosystem,” said Joschka Friedag, CEO of Cringle.
“With solarisBank we have found a partner that shares our ideas and vision of a European wide fintech market.”
SolarisBank received its banking license from German regulator BaFin in March with a mission to provide API-based banking services to fintech startups across Europe.
“Our partnership with Cringle underlines our ambitions to be a European banking platform,” says solarisBank board member Marko Wenthin, “We’ve passported our banking license to several European countries already and are able to expand quickly.”