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Banking &
Digital Solutions
Unique combination of banking and digital expertise
In our Banking & Digital Solutions segment, we offer companies from the housing, property, energy and related industries access to comprehensive banking services, as well as digital solutions for financial processes and bulk payment transactions.
A promising and changing market
Companies in the housing, property and energy industries have been faced with major challenges for several years now. These include sustainable transformation and technological change, the trend toward urbanisation and the sharing economy, e-mobility, the availability of an increasing volume of data, and much more. To remain successful in the future, these companies are adapting their processes and business models, and need innovative banking services and process optimisation products to help them do so.
The main growth drivers in this market include:
Increasing digitalisation
More and more processes in the housing, property and energy industries are being digitalised. This also translates into increased demand for innovative and suitable digital solutions for banking and financial services.
Changing needs of property users
Digitalisation is one of the factors currently driving a process of significant change in the needs and wishes of property users. They not only expect better digital infrastructure, but also want greater consideration to be given to sustainability requirements and want to benefit from faster, more effective and cheaper processes – for example when it comes to service charge invoicing, rent payments or tenant deposit management.
Cross-company and cross-sector networking
Cross-company and cross-sector networking within the housing, property and energy industries is becoming increasingly important in the drive to optimise processes. Aareal Bank offers various solutions to support this process – for example by facilitating standardised, cross-sector invoice exchange in the payment transactions segment.
Changes in payment preferences
From PayPal to instant bank transfers and Apple Pay: the choice of available payment methods is growing constantly. Solutions that allow housing companies to provide their tenants with easy access to alternative payment methods, so as to increase the level of service on offer, are in high demand.
More intense competition and mounting cost and efficiency pressure
The disruptive changes in the housing, property and energy industries have allowed new providers and business models to emerge. This makes competition more intense, and puts mounting cost and efficiency pressure on established providers. The response to this trend lies in IT solutions that optimise processes and/or open up new sources of income.
New technologies
AI, big data, Blockchain These rank among the key technologies of the future within the financial sector and are becoming increasingly important in the housing, property and energy industries, too. They also open up new opportunities for expanding our own service portfolio and tapping into additional attractive business areas.
Lars Ernst
Managing Director BDS
“Our products allow us to inspire an increasing number of clients and grow in the process. The upcoming moves to expand our offering will, however, provide even greater impetus for our development.”
Growth through expansion
In the Banking & Digital Solutions segment, we are focusing, on the one hand, on maintaining the stability of deposit volumes – important for our funding – up to 2024 at the current level of more than €12 billion. On the other hand, we will concentrate on making more effective use of our core payment solutions offering. In doing so, we will be focusing on acquisitions as well as on intensified cross-selling with our own clients and Aareon’s international clients. The segment’s net commission income is expected to increase by around 13% per annum on average (2020-2023).
We are planning to expand our product portfolio based on our expertise in payment transactions, in particular. We have already developed a variety of initiatives and measures to help us achieve this, including, for example, the market launch of several promising digital solutions, such as Aareal Meter, Aareal Aval, Aareal Exchange & Payment Platform and Aareal Connected Payments. We also tapped into the fast-growing market with private landlords and small-scale property managers through our investment in objego back in 2020, and are working with our subsidiary plusForta on our package of solutions for digital deposit guarantees to round off our tenant deposit management portfolio.
We are expanding our product portfolio and entering new markets.
Furthermore, we are aiming to exploit the growth potential that cooperations and partnerships offer us, particularly in the areas of product development and marketing. We are also planning to make acquisitions in our core business areas in order to allow us to incorporate promising innovative products and integrate attractive, fast-growing companies.
Dr Christian Fahrner
Managing Director BDS
“We intend to systematically exploit the numerous growth opportunities emerging in the markets relevant to us by launching a vast range of initiatives and measures over the next few years. Some of the products and services we launched on the market only recently are already showing very promising development.”
New high-potential products
and services
The ladenetz.de platform offers simplified billing processes to charging point providers.
Aareal Exchange & Payment Platform
The Aareal Exchange & Payment Platform allows companies to automate a whole range of payment and bank-related services and integrate them into their own ERP systems. The platform was expanded further to include PayPal in 2021. Initially aimed at applications in the housing and energy industry, the aim is to expand the platform to cover other sectors in the medium term.
Aareal Meter
Aareal Meter is a digital mobile solution for reading meters and further processing the readings. Using smartphones to photograph consumption data, scan it and upload it to a cloud-based platform reduces the effort involved in the meter reading process and minimises the potential for errors. The quality and transparency of the data can also be improved as part of a further reconciliation process with the partners involved.
Aareal Connected Payments
Aareal Connected Payments simplifies invoice management for complex payment flows between different partners on a shared platform. The new e-mobility invoicing solution is initially being used on the ladenetz.de platform, which is accessed by more than 200 providers of charging stations for electric cars. In the future, Aareal Connected Payments can also be adapted to suit platform solutions in other industries.
Aareal Aval
Aareal Aval is a tenant deposit solution that can be managed as part of a fully digital process. It provides housing and property management companies with a very easy way of storing a deposit guarantee for each tenant in their ERP system. Aareal Aval fully automates the processes linked to tenant deposit management, making them much faster and much more straightforward.
Aareal Client Service Portal featuring the Taara chatbot
The Aareal Client Service Portal is the first port of call for all corporate clients that want to find out more about the Aareal Portal or need help accessing and managing their accounts. As well as a personal client hotline, the digital assistant Taara is also on hand to provide support: The chatbot is able to answer numerous questions regarding the Aareal Portal unassisted 24/7.
New name,
sharper profile
We laid the foundations in 2021 for a new market
ositioning of our second business segment
Banking & Digital Solutions.
