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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

I'm a huge fan of N26. Been using them as my primary bank for 2 years.

My main wishlist for them:

- Allow access to more "raw" data (eg. log of failed payment attempts and why they failed, etc)

- 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)

- Don't expire fingerprint auth after 30 days if I'm actively using it.

- Clarify the differences between the business and personal accounts. It's in a weird state right now.

- 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.

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).

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I've had them as my primary bank for about a year or so.

I would not recommend them to anyone, especially not as the main bank. Some issues I personally experienced:

- Double transaction entries (making monthly reports, subtotals, etc wrong).

- Failing to execute standing orders (not acceptable).

- Atrocious 9-5 support.

- Broken fingerprint login on certain android devices.

- Abysmal security [0]

- Couldn't log in few times (outside support hours), app/website unusable.

- A lot of other less severe bugs (categories being wrong in web and reports for example).

I've closed my account with then in October 2017, here's what happened since:

- I still get monthly reports about my closed accounts.

- I get various summaries e.g. the "Your 2017 with N26"

- They reported to SCHUFA (German credit rating agency) a month AFTER my account was closed that I opened an account with them (again).

- After I contact their legal department about a week ago and I demanded my data in accordance with German data protection laws, they started to apparently do something with my account, since now I get emails like that my phone has been unpaired and so on.

- For all the issues I've outlined above after closing my account I've tried contacting support. They ignore me after I clarify that my account should've been deleted.

This is just what I remember from the top of my head. I also paid for their premium N26 Black subscription.

[0]: https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7969-shut_up_and_take_my_money

> Abysmal security [0]

At 24:57 in the talk, there is a specific section about "disclosure and conclusion", where the talker points out that N26 acted very professionally and that all issues have been solved. You can hardly say so about regular banks, which usually just ignore you or send you canned responses (I know, I tried to report some issues to two banks of mine, still unsolved after 3 years).

"Abysmal security" N26 had 0 public security incident, what was reported wasn't actually an incident but a potential one. the researcher worked with N26 to fix the issues and it was fixed before the talk was scheduled.

Also wouldn't recommend them. I was a early customer, and when they switched over from the underlying 3rd party bank to their own banking license, they had to swap out everyones credit/debit cards. I lost access to my account in the process and only after a very tedious process of going through their support was able to get it back. Just because you are a digital bank doesn't mean you don't have to provide good support.

The underlying third-party bank was SolarisBank[0], for anyone who's interested.

[0]: https://www.solarisbank.com/de/

No, they were using Wirecard before they got their own license.

https://www.wirecard.com/

> In November 2016 customers were asked to transfer their accounts to N26 Bank's infrastructure. As a result, they would have to get a new account IBAN number, while the previous accounts held by Wirecard would be terminated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N26_(bank)#History

Wirecard

This echos almost everything I heard from the people I know in Berlin that have an N26 account.

The glorifying interview with the CTO about there rockstar techstack makes this all kind of silly https://community.risingstack.com/how-n26-built-a-modern-ban...

They go on about idempotency etc. but everyone complains about double or non-existing transactions.

Same here, was kind of a early adopter in 2015 and I really want to like them, but they're making it very hard if not impossible.

For a startup that wants to disrupt banking, they have horrible UX (one example, when it was time to change creditcards because they changed the backend bank. A new card was sent and then the App asked for a 8 digit number on the card. I spent 2 days until I figured out, they want the number from the OLD card).

The advertise that everyone gets a small creditline with them (1000 eur, or so), but when I applied for that after 3 years being a customer I was denied completely (just wanted 200 Eur) for 3 Months or so.

The other points like security are already mentioned by the parent post.

I was with them when they were still a frontend to Wirecard Bank and called Number26. Not sure if it's gotten better since then but their support was much more unprofessional than any other German bank I've ever dealt with. It's important to notice that we have so-called direct banks (i.e. without a physical branch) for a few decades now and the competition had a long time to work out their processes.

Number26 was unable to provide actual, immutable account statements. They generated some PDFs for every month but they were often retroactively changed on certain events (e.g. if a merchant cleared a transaction more than seven days later). I was unable to get someone there to even recognize the problem.

Their terms of services stated that foreign currency transactions were converted using a data source made available to both parties. Naturally I asked for access to that data source. The one linked in the FAQ didn't match my actual transactions and was missing some currencies I used completely. Once again, support was unable to understand the problem at all and repeatly said that Number26 doesn't have access to the fx rates they use either. So much for the contract they themselve drafted.

I then closed my account shortly before the switchover to their own bank. The new terms said that transactions might not be processed on certain days announced on a paper at their Berlin HQ which I found pretty amusing (and have never seen in other terms). Hopefully that has changed now as well.

The problem is that the alternatives are even worse. I'm with Deutsche bank, and I fear the stress levels that I get every time I have to do anything with them. They send paper letters for anything. Their login is horrendous, but so is everything inside it (easily 90's look and feel). I cannot get transactions older than 3 months. Customer service (in German, of course; not even in Berlin it's easy to get someone to speak EN) is the worst, even for DE standards. They make sure you feel mistreated, because they only care about big corp accounts. I have a business account that produces some serious revenue for them and they still treat me like I'm bothering them.

I don't use N26 because they don't have business accounts, but I would if they did.

I, and all my friends, are with ING-DiBa. I have nothing but praise for those guys. Great website, good apps for the my phone, amazing and responsive support. Zero fees. If DB is as crappy as you write, consider giving ING a shot instead?

Just gonna argue the "Abysmal security" part, because there's nothing wrong with their security and the source is bs as explained here: https://youtu.be/PNuAzR_ZCbo?t=634

That's weird, I've been using them for ~2 years now and I have not had one of the issues you mention.

You certainly had a very big security problem (see link in parent comment).

A lot of people hate in-app support. Revolut (similar concept to N26) for example really screwed this up, someone drank too much AI and bot framework koolaid at a conference and now millions of users (and arguably the pecetion of the business) suffers. Having a email support method is a must.

Yeah I'm not talking about chatbot style support, but real live chat support. They have it on the web UI, it would be nice to have in the app again. But I'd settle for a contact form in the app like they used to have.

> Revolut (similar concept to N26)

Isn't Revolut a pre-paid debit card though? N26, in contrast, is a bank.

EDIT: oh, I see that "On 8 February 2017, Revolut launched UK current accounts, enabling its customers to get a personal IBAN" on their Wikipedia article.

Not a "real bank" yet, but they applied for a European banking license in Lithuania last year. https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/07/revolut-is-applying-for-a-...

I am a customer, but not a huge fan.

- There is a standardized API for interfacing with banks, HBCI, which almost every other bank supports. Except N26, who stated that they have no plans to do so.

- Their app (which is the only real way to interact with the account - there's a web interface but it's clear that the app is meant to be the main way) used to be really bad. They gradually improved, to the point that I wasn't able to get an error message by just opening it, but the fact that that was a pleasant surprise is not a good sign.

- They repeatedly made misleading statements about the acceptance of their credit card (meaning that I'd be stranded at an airport had I not had another card), their support was generally slow.

- They lured users in with great conditions, then made them progressively worse.

The instant credit card usage notifications work well though, and since it's free... but I don't consider them good enough to use them as my main bank - I expect anything that goes even slightly outside of everyday mainstream transactions to go horribly wrong.

If they manage to gradually fix their issues, they could be great, but as of now, I feel like they're just another startup that wants to "disrupt".

> There is a standardized API for interfacing with banks, HBCI, which almost every other bank supports. Except N26, who stated that they have no plans to do so

Won’t that change when PSD2 comes into full enforcement?

Maybe/hopefully. Does PSD2 mandate a specific protocol? If not, I suspect each bank will just cook up some horrible, incompatible-to-everything-else API, and it will be completely useless.

IIRC this is exactly the case.

I don’t recommend N26. I was insulted on Twitter by their customer support staff after asking to close my account.

I couldn’t close the account through their website or app but had to send a paper form to Germany!

I wouldn’t call that an “internet bank”.

> I couldn’t close the account through their website or app but had to send a paper form to Germany!

This is a side effect of German banking regulation, not a fault of N26 (or any other Internet bank)

I'm a big fan of N26 too but I longer go around evangelizing it to my friends and family. I got literally hundreds of people to sign up last year.

I only discovered that support was no longer available in the app when I actually _needed_ support, it was frustrating wasting time trying to find something I was sure I had seen in the app before.

So, I still use my N26 account, and appreciate it in many ways but, if they are capable of making bad decisions like that, there will obviously be more cost-cutting once they have solidified their position in the market. I cannot, in good faith, evangelize a service that may end up being as bad as the traditional banks.

I've been using them for the past 4 months and haven't had to renew the fingerprint auth. Perhaps they solved it recently?

I'll switch to them as soon as they support Sweden or Malta. HSBC is pure evil.

oh jeez I was with HSBC in the UK, what a train wreck of a banking experience.

I recently moved to the UK and I now use HSBC personal + business, it is the worst banking experience. The problem is that there is no real alternative yet...

Monzo for personal and Tide for (small) business. Though I probably would only use Tide as a business expenses account, as they're not FCSC protected

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