I'm a huge fan of N26. Been using them as my primary bank for 2 years.<p>My main wishlist for them:<p>- Allow access to more "raw" data (eg. log of failed payment attempts and why they failed, etc)<p>- Move support back into the mobile app. It used to be there, now it's a pain to find a phone/email to contact. (The web UI still has live chat)<p>- Don't expire fingerprint auth after 30 days if I'm actively using it.<p>- Clarify the differences between the business and personal accounts. It's in a weird state right now.<p>- More default categories, better tagging, etc. The aspect of tagging your transactions is super cool, it's just a bit hard to use right now.<p>I'm a huge fan though and 100% recommend it to anyone living in Europe. If someone wants an affiliate invite, shoot me an email (profile).
I live in Germany for almost 3 years now and for the first half I just used EUR account of my Polish bank. I only needed an account here, because I moved to a new apartment. And to sign up for Internet connection available provider needed German bank account number. It's prevalent to pay for all recurring costs with Lastschriftmandat. That's totally alien to me. I prefer just to manually pay it myself with bank transfer. Generally it's a form to fill out, sign and send - then they go to your bank and get paid.<p>Anyways I tried with two other banks first. One did not answer at all. A second one after 4 weeks or so just answered that they will not open an account for me, with no reason why. With N26 it was really fast and pleasant.<p>From my Polish bank I have Visa card and at least in Berlin it's not widely accepted. N26 gives Maestro card that is accepted a bit wider. However German EC card is a standard one that will be accepted everywhere where cards are accepted, while it's not the same with Maestro. However there are many many places that require cash. N26 gives 3 free withdrawals. My Polish bank gives me free withdrawals everywhere. That's why I still use it. Even more, in Poland cards are very widely accepted. Lately I could get by with just a phone in my pocket - Android pay is supported.<p>N26 has quite nice application, but it does not even begin to compare to my Polish bank. In Polish bank when I want to setup a transfer it gives ability to fill out everything based on history. In N26 I have to copy the amount and the message, it's tiresome.<p>Now I think about account in more traditional bank to get EC card and set up join account with my wife, that's also not possible in N26.
I think a lot of expats in Germany uses N26 because it used to be easy to open an account without a registered address. But unfortunately, the e-postident doesn't work amymore for most of the South Asian passports (<a href="https://www.facebook.com/deutschepost/posts/1805883209423283" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/deutschepost/posts/1805883209423283</a>). Hope N26 will introduce more ways of identification.
I use N26 as my main bank, but there have been some annoyances/stupid bugs. For example, when I tried to make a transfer and used Greek in the description, the app got in a very weird crashy loop. The website's login screen looked weird on Firefox, the UX is odd (it requires you to confirm a transfer four times), and it takes them forever to fix these things.<p>Other than that, I really like them, and they're very innovative for a bank, but that's a very low bar. Hopefully they'll step up their game with this funding. Revolut, by comparison, is much more usable, although there are things I don't like there as well.
The key issue with N26 is their poor unit economics. Right now, they are losing money on most of the checking accounts, as they foot the ATM wholesale fee (though they limit it to 3 "free" ATM withdrawals per months).<p>The issue is that they don't have enough premium services to compensate for the "loss leader" like regular banks do. The hope from Tencent and Allianz is that they will add these now, and then move to great unit economics, but for now they are bleeding red ink.
Can someone list the advantages of using this instead of a regular bank+credit card?<p>1) Monitoring spending in real time or on a weekly basis is useful, and this seems to make it easier. But just a tool for downloading, viewing and analyzing the data from a regular credit card site would suffice, and can be self made.<p>2) It creates competition for the regular banks, so they potentially would stop being hogs about some of the fees.<p>But what else?
A paper about N26 Security <a href="https://www1.cs.fau.de/filepool/projects/n26/n26-roots.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www1.cs.fau.de/filepool/projects/n26/n26-roots.pdf</a>
I mainly use my N26 card here in the US, because I believe the conversion rate is cheaper (I never actually checked).<p>If you are in the US, the instant notification of credit card swiping is mostly useless in restaurants, since it doesn't show the tip until the transaction is actually processed a long time later. A few restaurants ask you to go in the back with them to type your pin, because they have a chip reader, but they don't yet have the wireless "gameboy" (it just occurred to me that pin+tip might be a tall order, the pin protects the amount too).
Using N26 for last 6+ months. Love no fee on transfers, realtime notifications, their masterkey works worldwide (had no problems in eu, us and canada), easy to block/enable internet or abroad payments and daily limits. I don't do atm withdrawals though.
Overall great deal for me sofar. Would recommend.
There was an interesting CCC talk about N26 security in 2016<p><a href="https://disruptive.asia/researcher-n26-security-gaps/" rel="nofollow">https://disruptive.asia/researcher-n26-security-gaps/</a><p>Their security seemed a bit lax back then
I'm Croatia based I've been using revolut for a year now. My only complaint with all these "new banks" is: none of them supports Apple Pay.<p>Maybe now that N26 is going to become a real bank supporting Apple Pay will become a possibility?
It would be great to create a new bank from scratch solving basic issues current banks have. The difficult part is the regulatory aspect if they want to operate in different states beyound EU.
A year ago I had $100 balance and my $50 payment to some cafe turned it into $150. They added money instead of deducting it. That was fixed soon but that's how I still feel about N26.
Maybe banks outside the US are terrible, but honestly in the US I find most "big banks" to be completely fine. JPM Chase, Amex, and Cap 1 started heavily investing in their digital units years ago and IMO it shows. Would not say the experience is perfect but I don't need perfect UX...I need reliability and stability.<p>One reason I would never move my primary banking to a startup is customer service. There's absolutely no way that a startup is going to have 24/7 online/phone support like the big banks do.
I have had N26 for more than a year. I use it for shopping, as a secondary account. I don't use cash anymore.<p>I've had no problems. But why do they have the "Statistics" button on their website if I couldn't use it since I registered???