What African Banks Can Learn From Cross River and Solaris
Two banks you have never heard of power Stripe, Samsung Pay, Affirm, Trade Republic, and Coinbase. Their model is available to any African bank willing to build for it.
There is a bank you have never heard of. It does not advertise. Its name is not on your card. You have never queued at its counter, and you will never find its logo on a mobile app.
And yet, every time you process a payment on Stripe, buy now and pay later through Affirm, trade commission-free stocks on Trade Republic, or tap a Samsung phone at a checkout in Germany, that bank is there. Working in the background. Clearing the transaction. Holding the license. Carrying the regulatory weight.
Two banks, actually.
Cross River Bank in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Solaris in Berlin, Germany.
Neither is the most famous bank in its market. Neither is the largest. They chose a different measure of success. That choice is the most important lesson any African bank can take from their story.
The Model: How It Actually Works
The mechanics matter. Specifics always do.
Both banks operate on a B2B2C architecture. The bank serves businesses. Those businesses serve consumers. The bank never touches the consumer directly. The consumer sees only the partner brand. The bank sees only the transaction economics.
Revenue flows from the business layer: API usage fees, interchange sharing on card transactions, software licensing, lending margin on loans originated through partner platforms, compliance packaging charges, and float income. It is a fundamentally different income statement from a retail bank. No branch costs. No consumer marketing. No teller lines.
The license becomes the product. The balance sheet becomes the infrastructure. The compliance framework becomes a commercial asset.
Cross River Bank: The Fintech Backbone of America
Gilles Gade founded Cross River in 2008 as a community bank serving small businesses in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Its first fintech partnership came in 2010. That single decision redirected the institution’s entire trajectory.
By early 2026, Cross River powers lending, payments, card, and crypto solutions for over 100 technology partners, including Stripe, Affirm, Coinbase, Plaid, Revolut, DailyPay, Checkout.com, and Bill.com. In March 2026, it raised a further $50 million to fuel expansion across AI, crypto, and embedded finance.
Take Affirm. Affirm is the face of Buy Now, Pay Later in the U.S. consumer market. Cross River is the lender of record behind every point-of-sale loan Affirm offers. The consumer sees Affirm at checkout. Cross River originates the credit, carries the regulatory obligation, shares the risk, and earns the lending margin.
Affirm owns the customer interface. Cross River owns the credit infrastructure. That division is the model in its simplest form.
Upgrade, valued at $7.3 billion, uses Cross River for consumer credit. Cross River upsized its revolving credit facility with Upgrade from $150 million to $250 million in February 2026. The bank’s balance sheet is capital infrastructure for its partners’ growth.
Stripe uses Cross River for online payment processing, deposits, and settlement within the U.S. financial system. When a merchant collects a payment through Stripe, Cross River is part of the infrastructure that clears it. Coinbase uses Cross River’s backend API bank core for money movement, providing the fiat-to-crypto and crypto-to-fiat settlement rails that allow its users to move dollars in and out of the crypto ecosystem compliantly.
Remitly leverages Cross River’s push-to-card services for near-real-time remittances. DailyPay partners with Cross River for on-demand earned wage access, giving workers the ability to draw their pay before payday. Plaid partnered with Cross River in mid-2025 to launch a Request for Payment solution, enabling instant pay-ins and more direct money movement.
Cross River’s net interest income reached $477 million in 2024, over 70% of total revenue, funded by low-cost deposits held by its fintech partner ecosystem. It grew from $100 million in assets in 2010 to over $9 billion a decade later. Every dollar of that growth came from fintech partnerships, not branch expansion.
Cross River also moved up the value chain. CRB Securities, its investment banking arm, now offers capital raising, M&A advisory, ABS issuance, and loan sale services to the fintech ecosystem. A community bank became a full-stack financial infrastructure provider.
Solaris: Europe’s Compliance Engine
Solaris launched in Berlin in 2016 with one thesis: digital companies across Europe needed a licensed, technically modern banking partner and could not find one. It secured a full banking license from BaFin, Germany’s financial regulator, and quickly discovered the demand extended well beyond fintechs to all sorts of digital companies wanting to add financial services to their own products. Solaris has raised a total of $693.83 million, with investors including SBI Holdings, BBVA, and ABN AMRO Ventures.
The Samsung partnership is its clearest case study. Solaris partnered with Samsung Electronics and Visa to bring Samsung Pay to Germany. Samsung’s President of German operations stated the reason directly: instead of entering numerous partnerships with various banks, they chose a single infrastructure partner with proven regulatory expertise.
Solaris provided the technical and regulatory infrastructure for one of the world’s largest consumer electronics companies to offer mobile payments without obtaining a banking license. That is the product. Not an account. Not a card. The entire regulated machinery that makes a consumer financial product legal and functional in Germany, packaged and delivered through an API.
Trade Republic focuses entirely on the stock trading product. Solaris handles the cash infrastructure. That clean division of labor is the model in its purest form.
Trade Republic, now one of Europe’s largest retail investment platforms, chose Solaris because the compliance and licensing costs of handling customer funds internally would have made commission-free trading economically impossible. Solaris’s API-accessible escrow account gave Trade Republic the ability to handle customer funds at a cost structure that made the product viable.
American Express partnered with Solaris to launch a Splitpay installment feature, allowing customers at German e-commerce merchants to convert purchases into monthly payment plans. Solaris delivered the credit product infrastructure while American Express maintained the customer relationship.
ADAC, Germany’s largest automobile club with 1.3 million credit card holders, chose Solaris as its co-branding credit card partner. The ADAC win marked Solaris’s move from powering fintech startups to powering established corporate institutions. The model scales across the full spectrum of digital companies, not just young technology firms. BP, the global energy company, also uses Solaris’s banking infrastructure for financial services embedded into its fuel and mobility ecosystem.
What African Banks Must Take From This
The model is clear. The lessons sharpen when the examples are specific.
The license is a product. Price it and sell it.
Every African bank holds what every African fintech wants and cannot easily get: a central bank license. In Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and Ghana, licensing timelines run from months to years. Cross River and Solaris built entire businesses around packaging that asset and selling it to companies that had customers but lacked regulatory standing. An African bank that does the same becomes the engine beneath every fintech in its market. Africa’s fragmented regulatory landscape makes this asset even more valuable than it was in New Jersey or Berlin.
Build the API layer. Nothing works without it.
Solaris’s founding decision was to build a modern API for integrating financial services with the outside world, concentrating entirely on API accessibility. Most African banks cannot receive an API call from a fintech partner. The integration work required runs to months. That friction kills partnerships before they begin. The bank that builds a clean API gateway above its core becomes connectable. The bank that does not stays isolated from the fast-growing ecosystem around it.
Infrastructure revenue scales without retail costs.
African banks competing for the retail customer face rising costs, mobile money competition, and compressing margins. The infrastructure model does not carry those costs. It scales on API calls, partner growth, and float income from partner-held deposits, without a single new branch. BaaS providers earn revenue through a model more comparable to SaaS, making compliance-intensive periods strong commercial years for infrastructure providers. Kenya’s fintech sector alone attracted 34% of the country’s $382 million in debt funding in 2024.
Partner governance is the business, not a function within it.
Both Cross River and Solaris carry the regulatory exposure of every product their partners build on their infrastructure. The FDIC issued a consent order to Cross River in 2023 regarding fair lending compliance, requiring regulatory approval for new partners and products. BaFin imposed a fine on Solaris and sent a special representative to oversee compliance improvements. An African bank powering third-party products carries the same exposure. Partner governance must be built before scale arrives, not after the regulator calls.
Move up the value chain as partners grow.
Cross River did not stay at a single layer of the stack. It added an investment banking arm, began taking equity in fintech partners through Cross River Digital Ventures, and now provides capital raising, M&A advisory, and loan sale services to its fintech ecosystem. An African bank that starts with BaaS infrastructure earns API fees today. The bank that also takes equity stakes in its fintech partners and grows alongside their trajectories earns across decades.
The African Opportunity
The conditions for this model in Africa are, in certain respects, more favorable than they were in New Jersey or Berlin when Cross River and Solaris started.
Africa has a large and rapidly growing population of fintechs, agri-platforms, telcos, gig economy apps, and super-apps that need licensed banking infrastructure and cannot easily obtain their own licenses. Experts project 2026 will mark the transition from African fintech going global to becoming the globe itself. Telcos are acquiring banking licenses. Neobanks like Kuda, TymeBank, and FairMoney are crossing the regulatory threshold and competing directly with incumbent banks. Every one of them needs banking infrastructure they do not currently own.
The gap between who holds a license and who holds a customer base is wide and structural. African banks sit on the license side of that gap. The fintech ecosystem is building on the customer side. Even regulators are moving: Ghana and Rwanda signed Africa’s first fintech licence-passporting agreement in 2025, and Kenya and Rwanda followed in 2026, reducing the friction for cross-border partnerships. The infrastructure model is the bridge.
Cross River grew from $100 million in assets in 2010 to over $9 billion a decade later, driven entirely by fintech partnerships. Solaris went from ten employees in Berlin to the infrastructure behind Samsung, American Express, Trade Republic, and ADAC.
Neither waited for the market to arrive at their counter.
They built the infrastructure. Priced the license. Packaged the compliance. Opened the API. Named the partners. Earned the revenue.
The question for African banks is not whether the model works.
Cross River and Solaris settled that.
The question is which African bank will be the first to build the continent’s version of it.
