Solaris Scales Embedded Finance with ACI Worldwide’s SEPA Instant Payment Platform

Solaris has successfully migrated its SEPA Instant payments infrastructure to ACI Worldwide’s cloud-native ACI Connetic platform. This move is a critical response to the EU Instant Payments Regulation, ensuring the embedded finance leader can scale real-time transactions for its diverse ecosystem of fintech and corporate partners while maintaining high regulatory and security standards.

What was announced

Solaris, the Berlin-based embedded finance platform, has officially gone live on ACI Connetic, the unified cloud-native platform from ACI Worldwide designed for intelligent payments orchestration. This deployment represents the first phase of a broader payments modernization initiative at Solaris. By moving its SEPA Instant payments onto this infrastructure, Solaris aims to consolidate its operations and enhance its ability to innovate within the shifting European payments landscape.

The transition is driven by the EU Instant Payments Regulation, which mandates that payment service providers in the eurozone must be capable of receiving instant credit transfers and sending them at a price no higher than standard transfers. Additionally, providers must implement a "check of the payee" name matching service before authorization. ACI Connetic addresses these requirements through a single architecture that integrates payment processing, fraud prevention, and payments intelligence.

The platform allows Solaris to manage the high-volume, 24/7 demands of instant payments, which settle in seconds. This infrastructure serves as the foundation for Solaris’ long-term strategy to transform into a "Financial-Platform-as-a-Service" provider. Working alongside its majority shareholder, SBI Group, Solaris has also set out plans to develop its platform into pan-European financial infrastructure, supporting accounts, cards, and lending for its global client base of fintechs, digital brands, and multinationals.

"Going live on ACI Connetic is an important milestone in evolving our platform infrastructure. As Solaris matures into a Financial-Platform-as-a-Service provider, ACI Connetic gives us the scalable, robust foundation we need to deploy AI-driven, highly resilient payment processes that meet the highest European regulatory standards our partners and their customers expect."

Steffen Jentsch, CEO of Solaris.

The companies involved

Solaris is a prominent European embedded finance platform that holds a full German banking license. It enables fintechs, digital brands, and multinational corporations to integrate financial services—such as accounts, lending, and payments—directly into their own customer experiences. The company has evolved significantly since its inception, positioning itself as a critical layer of infrastructure for the digital economy. Its majority shareholder is SBI Group, a major Japanese financial services group that has been active in expanding its strategic footprint across the global fintech sector.

ACI Worldwide is a global leader in mission-critical, real-time payments software. The company provides a suite of solutions that allow corporations and financial institutions to process and manage digital payments, power omni-channel commerce, and manage fraud. ACI Connetic is its flagship cloud-native platform, designed to help banks and intermediaries modernize their legacy systems. ACI Worldwide has a deep history in the sector, with a massive presence in the global payments market, supporting thousands of customers across various geographies. The collaboration between these two entities highlights the growing trend of established banking-as-a-service providers seeking industrial-grade technology to meet tightening regulatory frameworks.

What FF News has reported before

FF News has closely followed the evolution of both ACI Worldwide and the strategic moves of SBI Group. Recently, we reported on how ACI Worldwide Expands ACI Connetic with Cloud-Native Financial Messaging for Real-Time Payments, a development that directly supports the modernization efforts seen today at Solaris. Additionally, the broader market context for ACI's research was highlighted in the ACI Worldwide Report: Financial Fragility Drives Massive Shift to Debit and Mobile Bill Pay. On the investment side, Solaris' majority shareholder has been active elsewhere, as dtcpay Secures $25M Series A to Scale Global Stablecoin Payment Infrastructure with SBI Group acting as a strategic investor. These stories underscore a period of intense technological upgrading and capital deployment across the global payments and embedded finance sectors.

What this means

This announcement signals that the "honeymoon period" for embedded finance providers is over; they are now being held to the same industrial-strength operational standards as traditional Tier-1 banks. By adopting ACI Connetic, Solaris is acknowledging that proprietary, "scrappy" fintech stacks are no longer sufficient to handle the regulatory weight of the EU Instant Payments Regulation. The move puts pressure on other Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) providers who may still be relying on fragmented legacy systems. In the European market, the ability to process instant payments at scale is no longer a differentiator—it is a survival requirement. The question now is how quickly competitors can modernize before regulatory scrutiny intensifies.