Mastercard's Product Heft Powers Payment Startups for German Bank

Mastercard will make its broad product portfolio available to Germany-based solarisBank to enhance the programming tools the bank extends to early stage payment businesses.  

Founded in 2015, solarisBank develops application protocol interfaces (APIs) to support broad banking services for fintech startups. Early this year solarisBank obtained a banking license in Germany so it can extend banking services directly to startups via its APIs, and now those users also may leverage Mastercard’s products, solarisBank said in an Oct. 11 press release.

Initially solarisBank will develop a Mastercard payment card product combining debit and credit features that will be available to its users via an API, according to the release.

In the next several months solarisBank plans to add APIs providing support for Mastercard-powered wallet services and mobile payments, said Marko Wenthin, solarisBank co-founder, in the release. Wenthin added solarisBank sees Mastercard operating as an “information hub” for a broad range of financial services products the fintech company will help to enable via APIs. “In the future, transactions such as payments will function exclusively using smartphones, wearables or the Internet of Things,” Wenthin predicted.