Our year in 10 photos

It’s been a great year for solarisBank — from winning Süddeutsche Zeitungs’s “Fintech of the Year” award, celebrating our first year of operations and our Series A round, and growing to over 140 employees, we have accomplished a lot in 2017.

Here are 10 photos from our year:

Marko Wenthin, Andreas Bittner, Roland Folz, Peter Großkopf © Max Threlfall

In early 2017, we had a very important new-joiner: our CEO Roland Folz (third from left). Roland brings us valuable international leadership experience from various industries, including banking.

In March, we celebrated two important milestones: we turned 1 year old, and we raised a Series A round that will help us grow as a team and make progress towards our vision! We celebrated with a look back on how it all started. And of course, there was champagne involved!

In the same month, we were proud to receive Süddeutsche Zeitung’s award for “Finanzgründer des Jahres” (“Fintech of the year”) at the SZ Finanztag in Frankfurt. Marko (second from left) pitched and accepted the award on behalf of solarisBank.

Top left to bottom right: Joan, Sinisa, Damian, Delia, Dennis, Christoph, Guido, Anna, Jeremy and Tobi.

No tech company is complete without the required Star Wars reference! We transformed our fabulous back-office team into their heroic space-faring counterparts to celebrate the launch of our Web UI in March. The Web UI is a frontend user interface that allows our partners to monitor and manage their operations and customer support in real-time. [In Yoda Voice] With our partners, the Force is!

Lea, Anna, Christin, Mari, Nancy, Eva, Armin, Philipp, Till and Michi.

solarians like to stay active — our running club runs together every Thursday (more or less 😉). To set a goal for the year, some of our solarians trained for and ran the Berlin half marathon in April. Here we are pre-race, ready to run!

We participated in some great conferences this year, including NOAH in our hometown of Berlin. Here Marko discussed “Banking in Context” with Martin Ott of Facebook and Frank Keller of PayPal. He started a conversation on the topic with a blog post here, getting great feedback from the fintech community including Chris Skinner and Jim Marous.

At solarisBank, we pride ourselves on celebrating diversity and fostering team spirit. Every 2 weeks we have a Ladies’ Lunch in-house, where we discuss both personal and professional topics. The view from the terrace also provides a lot of inspiration!

As a growing company, we want to make sure we keep a strong company culture and identify the corresponding values that have been present since the beginning. We asked all solarians to participate in the selection process by voting for their choice. In November, we unveiled the 6 values that define what it means to be a solarian and work at solarisBank. They are: Dedication, Transparency, Flexibility, Collaboration, Responsibility and Impact.

Doubling in size means it’s time for a new team photo! Last month, we took this picture over the river Spree in front of our offices and famed Berlin Fernsehturm (TV Tower).

🎊 🎉Happy Holidays and all the best for 2018 from all 140+ of us!! 🎊 🎉