Lanistar moves to full banking solution in UK, after Brazil launch

By Gloria Methri

London-based FinTech Lanistar Limited is preparing for launch in the United Kingdom, as soon as this Spring, 2023. Over the last two years, Lanistar has invested heavily in building a proposition in Latin America (LATAM) and expects to grow to over 1 million customers by mid-2023.

Lanistar is now planning to refocus its expansion on its ‘home turf’, using the learnings from its proposition in the Latin American market.

Lanistar’s CEO, Jeremy Baber, said, “The key to our launch (in Brazil) and those to follow in other parts of LATAM, has been our alliance partnership with Mastercard members, who offered a ‘Banking as a Service’ solution. This means Lanistar has a ‘one-stop shop’ solution for market entry in the region, offering a full suite of services including Bank Accounts, Card Issuing, fully digital onboarding, best-of-breed Regulatory Compliance, KYC, and Transaction Monitoring.”

“This has allowed Lanistar to concentrate on customer acquisition via our ever-growing social influencer family, and best-of-breed customer service, and continue the development of the customer proposition with new and innovative services. The successful launch we have seen in Brazil with Bankly/Acesso Solutions has made us review our growth plans in other regions.  This means we are making a change in the UK and EU.”

Lanistar has chosen to change its UK and EU partner from Modulr to its current card provider Mastercard, which offers it the required solutions.

Baber clarified, “We have had a close relationship with Modulr over the past two years and respect them in the industry, but regrettably they could not offer the Full Banking solution which has been key to our success in LATAM.  Our current Mastercard Partner can now offer us that same ‘one-stop shop’ for the UK and EU. Therefore, it was logical to make a clean break from Modulr and put our reliance fully on them for our full UK launch and later in the year in Europe.”