Neobanks in Berlin

A neobank that takes deposits is a credit institution under the German Banking Act and needs a bank license, branches or not. N26 calls itself the first 100 percent mobile bank with a full German banking license, granted in 2016. Trade Republic started with a securities trading license and kept customer deposits at partner banks, Solarisbank and Deutsche Bank among them, until the European Central Bank granted it a full banking license in December 2023, as the Börsen-Zeitung reported.

The other route is to use someone else's license. Solaris describes itself as "a German technology company with a full banking license" and its banking-as-a-service platform as having "everything you need to build your own banking products". A brand on top of it designs the app and the card, and the accounts and deposits sit at Solaris. For the customer, the license behind the IBAN decides which supervisor and which deposit guarantee apply. The banking as a service in Germany page explains the model.

A neobank has no branch, so software does the work a branch clerk did. Accounts open after an identity check inside the app; KYC in Germany covers video ident and the rules behind it. The anti-money laundering checks that follow are automated as well. N26 says it uses "sophisticated intelligence-based models that analyze the fraud potential of individual customers" before an account opens, and "self-learning transaction monitoring systems" that flag suspicious activity in real time. In a press release it put its spending on compliance, infrastructure and teams over the previous two years at more than 100 million euros.

That spending followed pressure from the supervisor. BaFin fined N26 4.25 million euros in 2021 for weak anti-money laundering controls and limited how many new customers it could take on; the limit ended in June 2024. In December 2025 BaFin appointed a special monitor at N26, as Banking Dive reported. The neobanks in Germany page follows the case in detail.

Berlin has more fintechs than any other German city. The Investitionsbank Berlin counts 189 active fintechs there, against 62 in Munich and 52 in Frankfurt, and about three quarters of Germany's 32 fintech scale-ups valued at more than 100 million euros. The neobanks grew out of that pool of founders and venture capital, while their supervisors sit elsewhere: BaFin in Bonn and Frankfurt, the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. The House of Finance and Tech is the city's fintech hub, where fintechs meet banks and regulators.

Trade Republic shows how the products have moved. It began as a mobile broker and, according to the Börsen-Zeitung (in German), added a current account and a credit card; it reported a profit of 34.8 million euros for the year to September 2024, its second profitable year in a row. The neobrokers in Germany page covers the broker side.

Yes. N26 was founded in Berlin in 2013 and has its head office in Berlin-Mitte. It holds a full German banking license and is supervised by BaFin. Its deposits are protected up to 100,000 euros under the German deposit protection scheme.

It depends on the license behind the account. At a bank with its own license, such as N26, deposits are protected up to 100,000 euros per customer under the EU Deposit Guarantee Schemes Directive. With an app built on a banking-as-a-service platform, the deposits sit at the partner bank, and its protection applies. Money held by an e-money institution is safeguarded, but it is not a deposit.

A neobank faces the customer: it runs the app and the brand. Banking as a service is the layer underneath, a licensed bank such as Solaris that offers accounts and cards to other companies through APIs. A neobank can hold its own license, as N26 does, or run on such a platform.

At the House of Finance and Tech, at FIBE, the fintech festival at CityCube Berlin in April, and at Payment Exchange. Finance Loop lists its networking events in Berlin in the calendar below.