Installment Financing for Renewables: Bees & Bears Runs Its Facility on Credibur
Most solar systems and heat pumps in Germany are sold by local installers, not by national platforms. The decision happens at the homeowner's kitchen table, with a quote in hand and a question about how to pay for it. Bees & Bears brings installment financing for renewables into exactly that moment, and it now runs the facility behind it on Credibur, our operating platform for structured credit.
Making the payment easy for the homeowner is half the job. Every contract signed through an installer ends up in a debt facility, and that facility has to work every single month.
How Bees & Bears brings installment financing for renewables to homeowners
Bees & Bears was founded in Berlin in 2023 by Jakob von Egidy and Marius Schondelmaier. Its platform lets independent installers, most of them small and medium-sized trade businesses, offer installment payments for solar systems, heat pumps, batteries and wallboxes directly in their quote. Homeowners get a decision within minutes and settle the system and the payment in one step. Government subsidies are pre-financed and settled once they are approved.
For installers this closes a real gap. Large digital sellers have offered installment payments for years. Local businesses, which carry out most installations in Germany, had nothing comparable inside their own sales process.
What a growing book of household contracts asks of a debt facility
A portfolio like this consists of many small contracts with private households, written through a large number of installers. Each new contract has to clear the facility's eligibility criteria before capital is drawn against it. As volume grows, the portfolio needs to be tracked closely enough that the limits in the facility documents stay visible well before they are hit. Capital providers expect their reports on a fixed schedule, built from the same data the checks ran on.
The homeowner never sees any of this, but it decides how fast the book can grow. Run on spreadsheets, every new installer partner and every new month adds manual work, and the figures a capital provider receives depend on whoever assembled the file that week.
Where Credibur fits
That monthly work is what Bees & Bears now runs on Credibur: new contracts checked against the eligibility criteria before capital is drawn, the portfolio tracked as it grows, reports delivered to capital providers on schedule. We describe how the platform sits between originator and capital provider in our overview of debt facility operations.
The model is familiar to us. Cloover, which also finances solar and heat pumps through installers, runs one of its facilities on Credibur as well. Residential energy books share the same operational pattern: high volume, small tickets, many installer partners, and capital providers who want a clear view of the portfolio.
Looking ahead
Germany's targets for heat pumps and rooftop solar mean a growing share of household energy investment will be paid in installments. The facilities behind those contracts have to scale at the same pace, without adding a person to the finance team for every new installer.
Thank you, Jakob von Egidy, Marius Schondelmaier, Axel Buhr, Shervin Panahi and the whole Bees & Bears team, for trusting us with your facility operations. We are looking forward to growing together.
If you finance renewables through installers and still run your facility in spreadsheets, schedule a demo. For more on independent checks against the asset tape and the cash, read what independent verification actually looks like.