Fidor Bank

» see fidor.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Matthias Kröner had run Direkt Anlage Bank and Martin Kölsch had been on the retail board at HypoVereinsbank, and in 2003 the two of them set up a company in Munich under their own surnames. It became Fidor AG in 2006 and then Fidor Bank AG. The name is Latin, close enough to "I am trusted", which for a bank is either a good joke or a load-bearing promise depending on how the next twenty years go. The idea underneath it was that a bank's relationship with its customers could run through social media and a public community instead of through a branch and a call center queue.

BaFin granted the full banking license in May 2009 and the accounts opened in March 2010. What you got was an ordinary German current account with unusual things bolted to it. Alongside the usual payments and savings products you could hold foreign currency, and from 2015 you could buy Bitcoin straight through the account, because Fidor had wired itself into Bitcoin.de and Kraken. The basics were patchier. Business customers kept asking for HBCI support, the German standard for talking to a bank from accounting software, and Fidor never built it.

What Fidor was actually known for was the community. Customers posted questions in public and other customers answered them, bank staff were in the same threads, and the bonus program paid people for taking part. The British arm pushed the logic further and tied the interest rate on its Smart Current Account to the number of Facebook likes on the page, a thing you announce in 2014 and stop mentioning by 2019. That UK operation closed in September 2019, blamed on Brexit uncertainty. The whole bank was German and briefly British, so for anyone outside those two markets it was something to read about rather than open an account with.

~ the chronicle ~

~ BPCE ~

In 2016 the French banking group BPCE bought Fidor for around a hundred million euros, to push along its own digital transformation and pick up retail customers while it was at it. Fidor's plan for the money was expansion outside Germany. In May of the same year Telefónica Deutschland announced O2 Banking on top of the Fidor platform, a mobile account you opened by video chat, with the app arriving that July and high-speed data thrown in as a reward for using the card. That partnership ran for four years. Telefónica moved O2 Banking to Comdirect at the end of April 2020.

By autumn 2018 BPCE was already looking for a buyer. The negotiations went nowhere slowly, and in April 2019 Kröner left as chief executive by mutual agreement, which is the phrasing used when nothing else will do. The software subsidiary, Fidor Solutions, went to Sopra Steria at the end of 2020. The retail and business bank was supposed to go to the American investor Ripplewood during 2022. That sale fell apart, and once it did BPCE announced it would end the customer business entirely and wind the bank up.

~ 3.75 million euros ~

On 21 December 2022, with the bank already on its way out, BaFin imposed fines of more than 3.75 million euros on Fidor for breaches of the money laundering act. A regulator fining an institution it is about to watch disappear is mostly a matter of putting the finding on the record. The finding was a control failure at a bank whose opening pitch had been openness.

~ the last day for deposits ~

In February 2023 Fidor started its liquidation and said it would route its customers to new accounts through Check24. In May it named the date: banking would stop completely on 20 July 2023, and every customer had until then to move their deposits somewhere else. The community went offline alongside the accounts.

The entity took another year and a half to finish dying. The banking license lapsed on 1 February 2025, at which point the former Fidor Bank AG stopped counting as a credit institution at all, and what remains is FG Management GmbH, a successor company that exists to settle outstanding claims. Type fidor.de into a browser today and that is where you land, on a white page of German legal text explaining that all customer relationships have been fully dissolved.

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