Lunar

At a glance

Project year 

2021

Bank type 

Coexistence

Cloud partner 

SaaS

Geography 

Nordics

A mockup of the Lunar App and the Lunar Card

Challenges

Lunar's rapid growth across Denmark, Norway, and Sweden necessitated the search for a technology partner that could scale and offer the flexibility to build several innovative products running from a single platform. It was clear that Lunar's existing core technology needed to be more agile and scalable to deliver on the future needs of the growing business.

Lunar searched for a core banking platform to run multiple product lines across several key Nordic markets. The objective was to ensure operational simplicity as the fintech expanded from its home base of Denmark to encompass Norway and Sweden.

The solution

Lunar selected Vault Core, running as SaaS, to replace its existing core banking technology – giving it the scalability and flexibility to serve multiple markets, business lines and products. This Nordic digital bank is now live with hundreds of thousands of customers running on Vault Core.

Vault Core now runs Lunar's product and ledger functionality in Norway and Sweden. The project began with Lunar rebuilding its existing products for Vault Core, which went live in 2022. Lunar will also build its future book in Vault Core.

The move to Vault Core has enabled the rapid roll-out of exciting and novel products, including shared accounts, high-interest savings accounts, and similar, including scaling to new segments in a few months.

An image of Will Farrel's campaign for Lunar in 2022

Our story

Lunar was founded in 2015 in Denmark with a strong entrepreneurial spirit – a fintech company aiming to provide customers with a full range of banking services. Lunar started as a fintech bank offering various banking services via partners before securing its banking license in 2019 from the Danish FSA, enabling it to provide complete banking services.

The fintech firm has since expanded to Norway and Sweden and counts over 750,000 users, including 20,000 entrepreneurs using Lunar's business offering. In 2021, Lunar raised a €210m series D funding round, one of the largest funding rounds ever recorded for a Danish fintech company. The funds were used to fuel the company's expansion and launch of new products.

Lunar was searching for a core technology provider that would allow them to own and customise their products according to their needs. Their goal was to achieve product independence, enabling them to build a roadmap for innovative products rather than relying on the limitations of inflexible core technology. Our Universal Product Engine was the perfect solution. This approach has given Lunar a significantly shorter time-to-market with key products, higher customer satisfaction as they deliver on their expectations, and, as a result, lower costs and higher efficiency.

Results‍

Multiple offerings, single platform

Vault Core is unique in that it runs every product, business line, and market from a single platform. This approach contrasts traditional core systems, which tightly couple their systems to product functionality – often requiring several overlapping yet siloed systems working to deliver a bank's product set. Even as the bank grows, expands into new countries, and builds new products – Vault Core does not grow in complexity.

Product independence

With traditional core banking systems, product functionality is tightly coupled with core functionality. This approach results in core systems that only offer limited configurability. In Vault Core, products are built independently of the platform – our clients have complete control over whichever product they want to develop, so long as it can be expressed in Python code. These products, we call smart contracts, significantly reduce the time and cost of building new products – and allow our clients to build innovative financial products – and they have full ownership of them, too.