The Berlin fintech that turned "shop around for a better savings rate" into an actual marketplace - and got a million people to do it.
Somewhere right now, a saver opens a single app, scrolls past a dozen banks they have never set foot in, and parks their money wherever the interest is highest. No new branch visit. No new pile of paperwork for each account. That quiet, almost unremarkable moment is Raisin's entire reason for existing - and it happens more than a million times over.
Raisin runs a savings and investment marketplace. On one side sit retail customers with cash that deserves a better rate. On the other sit banks that need deposits to fund their lending. Raisin is the matchmaker in the middle, and it has quietly become very good at the job: tens of billions of euros routed across more than 30 markets, 250-plus partner banks in the mix, and a business that finally turned a profit after a patient decade of building plumbing nobody could see.
"We see a roughly €15 trillion market that is not properly taken care of by banks."
- Tamaz Georgadze, Co-founder & CEOFour numbers, one theme: Raisin makes money by helping other people make money on the cash they forgot they had.
For most of modern banking, the deal was lopsided in a polite, hard-to-notice way. Your savings sat in one bank, earning whatever rate that bank felt like offering - often a rounding error away from zero. Moving to a better rate at another bank meant a fresh account, a fresh stack of identity checks, and a fresh afternoon you would rather spend doing literally anything else. Inertia, it turns out, is an excellent business model. For the bank.
Meanwhile, banks elsewhere in Europe were desperate for deposits. A small bank in one country might offer genuinely attractive rates but have no way to reach a saver two borders away. The supply of good rates and the demand for them existed in the same continent - just never in the same room. The friction between them was the whole problem.
The money was lazy because the system made effort expensive. Raisin made the effort almost disappear.
The thesis, in one lineIn 2012, three founders - Tamaz Georgadze, Frank Freund and Michael Stephan - made a bet that sounds almost too dull to fund: build a single account from which anyone could open savings products at banks all over Europe. No moonshots. No reinvention of money itself. Just remove the friction and let rates compete in the open.
The wager was that "boring but useful" could scale into something large, if you were willing to wait. And wait they did. Building cross-border deposit infrastructure means wrestling regulation in every market, integrating banks one careful API at a time, and earning trust before earning revenue. It is the opposite of an overnight success - which is exactly why it was defensible.
Three ex-strategy minds who decided the most exciting thing in finance was a savings account with a fair rate. Reader, they may have been right.
It took roughly a decade to turn a profit. In deposit infrastructure, that is not slow - that is the price of being trusted.
On patience as a strategyGeorgadze, Freund and Stephan launch the company in Berlin, known in Germany as WeltSparen - literally "world saving."
Money arrives from Index Ventures, PayPal Ventures, Ribbit Capital, Thrive Capital, btov, Goldman Sachs and Peter Thiel as the marketplace spreads across European markets.
Raisin enters the US market operating as "SaveBetter," pooling deposits through partner banks and credit unions.
Raisin merges with rival Deposit Solutions, consolidating two of Europe's biggest deposit platforms into one.
After roughly a decade, Raisin reaches profitability as rising rates send savers hunting for yield.
A Series E led by M&G Catalyst with Goldman Sachs lands at a unicorn valuation; the US "SaveBetter" brand becomes simply Raisin.
Raisin unifies its global presence under a single brand and reports surpassing €4 billion in returns generated for customers.
What a customer sees is almost suspiciously simple: an account where savings products from many banks line up, rates on display, ready to open in a few taps. Term deposits, high-yield savings, CDs, money market accounts - the dull-but-dependable corner of finance, finally shoppable. Underneath, Raisin handles the regulatory and operational machinery so a saver in one country can hold a product from a bank in another without ever feeling the seams.
But the marketplace is only half the company. The other half is sold to banks themselves: a cloud-native, API-driven, white-label platform - "savings-as-a-service" - that lets a financial institution launch its own deposit products or tap deposit funding on demand. And for customers who want their money to do more than sit still, Raisin layers on ETF portfolios, pension products and wealth management. Same idea, wider menu.
One account to compare and open term deposits, high-yield savings, CDs and money market products across hundreds of partner banks.
White-label, API-first platform technology banks license to launch deposit products and source funding on demand.
ETF-based portfolios and retirement products for savers who want yield with a little more ambition.
An open-banking channel where partner banks gather cross-border retail deposits without building their own distribution.
"Our goal is to make everyone's money perform better."
- Raisin, on the whole pointA clever idea is cheap. Raisin's case rests on the harder evidence: customers who came back, banks that plugged in, and a profit-and-loss statement that eventually behaved. The marketplace crossed a million customers. Partner institutions number in the hundreds across the EU, UK and US. And the returns handed back to savers - the money that would have evaporated in a low-rate account - climbed past the billions.
Figures are approximate, drawn from Raisin's own milestone announcements. The shape of the line is the point: more rate-hunting savers, more interest earned, fewer euros left on the table.
Raisin's backers read like a fintech hall of fame, and its partners reach into the banking establishment itself.
Index Ventures, PayPal Ventures, Ribbit Capital, Thrive Capital, Kinnevik, Goldman Sachs, btov, Deutsche Bank and Peter Thiel.
250-400+ banks and credit unions across 30+ countries supply the products on the marketplace.
Partnerships such as Deutsche Bank and Aareal Bank run on Raisin's platform technology.
Lewis & Clark Bank holds the omnibus custodial accounts that make pooled US deposits work.
When Goldman Sachs, PayPal and a credit union in Oregon all show up to the same fintech, you are looking at infrastructure, not a fad.
Strip away the funding rounds and the API talk, and Raisin's mission is almost old-fashioned: a fair shake for savers. Open access to the best products across borders, on one side. An efficient way for banks to fund themselves, on the other. The company does not want to be your bank - it holds no banking license for the marketplace, and your deposits sit with regulated partner banks under deposit-guarantee schemes. It wants to be the room where banks compete for you.
That positioning is the quiet radical bit. Most fintechs try to replace the bank. Raisin decided the bank was fine - it was the lack of competition that needed replacing.
Raisin doesn't want to be your bank. It wants to be the marketplace your bank has to compete in.
The strategy in one sentenceInterest rates are no longer a flat line near zero, and that changes everything for a business built on comparison. When rates move, savers start paying attention, and a marketplace that makes switching painless becomes the obvious first stop. The same machinery - open banking, deposit funding on demand, white-label savings - looks less like a niche and more like default infrastructure for how deposits will move across Europe and the US.
The open question is whether "shop your savings" becomes a habit the way "shop your insurance" did, or stays a power-user move. Raisin has a decade-long head start and a profitable base from which to find out.
Return to the saver opening that one app, parking their cash wherever the rate is best, and closing it again in under a minute. A decade ago, that minute was an afternoon - an afternoon most people never spent, which is exactly why their money sat earning nothing. Raisin's whole contribution is the disappearance of that afternoon.
No grand reinvention of money. Just friction removed, competition added, and a million people who now expect their savings to keep up. The most boring product in finance, finally made to compete. Turns out that was worth a billion euros.