Wiesbaden, 20 December 2022: SCHUFA Holding AG is acquiring the Berlin-based fintech company Forteil GmbH, provider of the well-known bonify platform, which offers services related to creditworthiness and personal finances. With this step, SCHUFA is accelerating the transformation of its private client business. One goal of the transformation is to increase transparency and give private individuals more control over their data. Forteil GmbH ("bonify") will remain a legally independent company. Both sides have agreed not to disclose the purchase price.
Tanja Birkholz, Chairwoman of the SCHUFA Management Board, says: "With bonify's customer focus and digital capabilities, we will continue to drive SCHUFA's transformation into a company aligned with the wishes and needs of consumers. We are bringing together SCHUFA's experience with the speed and innovation of the fintech Forteil in a joint strategy and roadmap."
"We are improving the quality and service of our offering for private individuals and becoming faster in the development of value-creating, digital products and apps," Birkholz explains the aim of the acquisition. "Specifically, private individuals will gradually receive free digital insight into personal SCHUFA data via bonify as early as 2023 - one year earlier than originally planned."
SCHUFA and bonify have already been working together intensively since this year, for example in the development of the SCHUFA app. In May 2022, SCHUFA and bonify announced their cooperation.
Since its founding in 2015, Bonify has successfully established itself with a clear focus on consumer interests among a target group interested in creditworthiness and financial topics online. The website www.bonify.de is used by more than one million people a year looking for digital credit rating products.
"SCHUFA is exactly the right company to fulfil bonify's mission, which is to holistically improve people's financial lives. The ingredients for this: transparency, the will to help and technical innovations," says Andreas Bermig, founder and CEO of bonify. "With the SCHUFA score, we finally have the piece of the puzzle we've been missing all along: the most relevant score in the German market. This significantly improves our offer. This benefits not only our users, but all consumers in Germany."
bonify remains legally independent and offers consumers the opportunity to understand and influence their SCHUFA scores in a protected space through its platform. Private customers can use bonify as a personal data cockpit and in future - at their own request - view the individual data stored at SCHUFA, including their score, free of charge. In addition, private individuals will be able to improve their score on bonify with additional information in the future.
In order for SCHUFA to process this information for score improvement, consumers must give their consent. Without active consent, no data will flow from bonify to SCHUFA or vice versa. This is ensured in a data protection-compliant manner via the two independent units.
"The point is to enable people to enjoy comprehensible tangible benefits via new digital services and to create real added value for them," says Birkholz. "The future offer of transparency and personal finance and data management at bonify is also intended to address in particular those groups that today can only participate in economic life to a limited extent due to non-existent information or negative payment experiences with SCHUFA."
Source: Schufa
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