Tag: Solarisbank

Berlin-based Solarisbank has encountered a significant setback with the discontinuation of the Grover Card payment card, leading to the termination of its collaboration with the technology rental platform Grover. This development marks the loss of another prominent partner for Solarisbank, following the recent withdrawal of half a million customer accounts by Neobank Vivid earlier this year.

Dock Financial S.A. is an e-Money Institution authorized by the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier, Luxembourg. Until previosly, the company was known as Crosscard and was a spin-off of the regulated payment services provider PPRO of former Wirecard manager Philipp Nieland. In 2021, Nieland acquired Crosscard with former Solarisbank and Penta manager Marko Wenthin and rebranded it into Dock Financial, billing itself as a Banking-as-a-Service provider and credit card issuer.

Over the last few years, we have found Berlin-based Solarisbank as a facilitating payment processor in many scams. In February, the German regulator BaFin sent a special auditor to the bank because of alleged money laundering problems. Now the German bank has dropped the term "bank" from its name and just calls itself Solaris. It wants to focus on the company's technical DNA and be perceived as a technology company rather than a bank. The strategic focus is, therefore, on the Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) offering for other FinTechs.

We have discovered Solarisbank as a payment processor in major broker scams such as Daxiron or BitCenter. Up until today, large cybercrime organizations use Solarisbank as scam-facilitating payment processors. Scam victims reported that they have transferred sometimes large sums to bank accounts of the scammers at Solarisbank. German BaFin informed Solarisbank that it is now being under scrutiny by a special auditor due to serious compliance and money laundering issues.