Comment by a254613e | Hacker News Reader

Comment by a254613e | Hacker News Reader

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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).

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