0
Country: Germany 
Year: 2009
An insurance company could use this innovation in order to:
- Business model: an bank could offer its customers rewards based on their social activity and reduce its support costs.
- Crypto-currency: a bank could partner with a bitcoin exchange platform to allow its customers to include bitcoin options to their regular transactions.
- Social banking: do the same in insurance (social insurance & sponsorship within the community).
- Employment: the high ratio [Employees / Turnover] suggests a new standard & trend that digital disruptors will impose to established players = threat for the banking industry that can reach Insurance.
Concepts
- Fidor, a 100% online and mobile bank available in Germany and the UK, aims at offering its customers innovative services adapted to the digital age. Fidor has 80,000+ full KYC customers and 320 M€ in deposits as of 2014. It also integrates a community of 300,000 users rewarded based on their activity (product reviews and discussions, where one of the most popular ones is around cryptocurrencies), and is a bitcoin-friendly bank.
- In 2014, Fidor was the first bank to integrate Ripple’s payment protocol using it for customers’ transactions and intra-bank payments.
- In 2013, Fidor has partnered with Kraken (regulated digital currency trading services) and bitcoin.de (German bitcoin marketplace). Since 2015, Fidor offers a “Bitcoin Express” option for German customers holding a “Fidor Smart Giro Account”: they can buy and sell bitcoin on bitcoin.de. directly from their bank account and receive bitcoin immediately after the purchase. “Fidor Smart Giro Account” is a full bank account with interest on credit balances and a credit card that can be recharged with bitcoin.
Consumer Benefits
- Real-time transactions: with “Bitcoin Express” option, customers can send / receive bitcoins within seconds, from their Fidor account.
- Security: with “Bitcoin Express” option, customers’ money is on their Fidor bank account (with statutory deposit security of €100,000 per customer), instead of lying unsecured on the bank account of the operator of the trading platform.
- Community co-creation: users help one another and create a bank that is centered around their interests and needs.
How to use
- Users sign up online (or via Facebook in Germany) to get access to the Fidor community.
- Then, they can open a pre-funded online ‘wallet’ based on referral account (as « light KYC »), in order to test out Fidor features.
- After full KYC (in Germany proof of identity can be done at branches of the post office), the customer can trade commodities, FX, digital currencies.