The company is launching a new digital bank account targeting SMEs. Running on top of banking-as-a-platform solarisBank, the new offering is designed to meet all of the banking needs of small to medium-sized businesses, including startups.
The premise for Penta is that SMEs and startups are currently underserved by banks and that “business banking can be really awful,” co-founder and CEO Lav Odorovic says. This typically sees traditional banks make account opening cumbersome and much more difficult than it should be, whilst simultaneously charging fees for making payments or international money exchange. There’s also a long list of other unmet needs, such as tracking employee spending and automating accounting and invoicing.
The startup isn’t planning on developing additional financial products of its own to up sell, but partnering with fintech and business app providers and offering their products directly to their customers in the Business App Store.
The digital-only bank is offering a free account for “bootstrapped” or very early-stage businesses that doesn’t charge a monthly account fee and provides 10 free transactions per month. Thereafter, each additional transaction costs EUR0.10 cents per transaction.
For now, Penta is only available to businesses registered in Germany. The startup bank plans to go Europe-wide in 2018.
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