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Comment by notkaiho | Hacker News Reader

What was poor about N26? I have a Monzo account but have not really used the others.

Revolut lets you receive many different currencies at 1:1 Interbank exchange rates during weekdays. That is pretty amazing compared to any bank.

- no IBAN number

- when receiving a new card due to upgrade the old one becomes void but there's no mention anywhere of this

- the login didn't work consistently (faceid today, tomorrow password)

- no extra features, or very poorly implemented

the general feeling I got from N26: not up to standard. it's a poor app with poor customer support.

- Of course you have an IBAN, it displays when you click on the profile icon on the top right.

- Sounds reasonable?

- FaceID works for 30 days, after that you have to enter your pass again for FaceID to work another 30 days, it says so when activating FaceID

- I agree that there are no really nice "extras"

> - Of course you have an IBAN, it displays when you click on the profile icon on the top right.

No IBAN support in the UK.

really bad startup, avoid.

Having lived in Germany (where N26 started), had the opposite experience. Revolut is a disaster. Reason being:

- No 3DSecure, renders it useless for most online transactions.

- No personal IBAN, uses some janky shared IBAN that is not tied to your name, which is required for many online depositing service like Coinbase.

> - No 3DSecure, renders it useless for most online transactions.

Revolut have had this since August 2019: https://blog.revolut.com/3ds-secure-payments/

> - No personal IBAN, uses some janky shared IBAN that is not tied to your name, which is required for many online depositing service like Coinbase.

this, unfortunately, depends on the jurisdiction/currency :(

>> - when receiving a new card due to upgrade the old one becomes void but there's no mention anywhere of this

> - Sounds reasonable?

Experience shows that postal deliveries might be really slow, so no guarantee when it arrives. Some deliveries just gets lost or stolen. Some people are travelling and not physically near their postal address for awhile. A lot of students and long-distance commuters really have two places they live so might not be staying very often where the card gets delivered. A lot of people (me) just don't open letters straight away, and certainly don't put the new card in my wallet straight away.

Which is why established banks know you need a month or so overlap. And modern banks know how to notify the customer properly that a new card is available. And progressive banks know to only deactivate the old card once the new one has been used.

Its really slow for me and very frustrating to use.

afaik they shipped cards from germany (really ineffecient) and were generally really really slow at anything

They lied about the reasons to betray 200.000 users in UK. One hint: it was not Brexit.

Do you have a source for this? All I see in the article is conjecture.

(Edit: I am not nor have I ever been an N26 customer, just curious.)

Do we have any evidence that they lied? Like actual evidence, not the comments of a few outraged customers (one of them literally calling it "fake news").

it's known across the financial news teams that N26 left the UK due to very low adoption numbers. applying to the UK regulators did not make sense.

That would confirm what they're saying - that the costs of continuing to give it a go in the UK market will increase substantially post brexit. Inside the EU costs would have been lower so it was worth trying to gain a foothold.

As I understand it, the need for UK regulation only came up due to brexit (before they were in thanks to the common market), so I guess "it's brexit" is sort of right, even if that leaves it a couple of steps?

Without it they could have coasted along for a while longer with not much extra effort.

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