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Comment by lIIllIIllIIllII | Hacker News Reader

there are a whole array of "neobanks" in Australia, a few of which have been bought out by large incumbents and their IT platforms subsumed into the colossus or whatever.

I can hazard a guess why this hasn't happened in Germany but I don't want to make assumptions based on stereotypes, lol.

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No this definitely happened in Germany too, Solaris has been around for a long time and a whole slew of German neobanks and trading apps have been built on top of it. You can open an account with most of them by downloading the app and doing a video identification process with your id.

Culturally though, older Germans mistrust then and want to use the older, established banks with physical branches.

The problem is that some of these neobanks suck too, e.g. N26 is a bit notorious for bad security (at least in the past).

> The problem is that some of these neobanks suck too, e.g. N26 is a bit notorious for bad security (at least in the past).

In the case of N26, the exploits that CCC found were disclosed and fixed before the presentation, this was also a while ago now, 2016-17 maybe? I'm not sure what the situation is now, though.

N26 is also infamous for being the go-to-bank for cybercriminals. That may be because they are easier to fool than your local bank branch where most financial stuff happens in Germany, but my impression is, that they don't care...

Interesting, makes sense. Deutsche Bank has a pretty bad reputation for money laundering, as does Germany in general and especially Berlin.

Or they were initially started by the big banks anyway. It's funny, when we moved to Australia we opened a joint NAB account. My wife still had a Citibank account. Shortly thereafter NAB bought Citibank, now we had two NAB accounts. Then we opened a Ubank account for better interest and turns out that one is also owned by NAB. Can't escape them...

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