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N26 will be leaving the UK

n26.com

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Re: N26 will be leaving the UK

#271

Post by thu2111 »

blibble wrote: post #104
threeseed wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you actually follow Brexit but the situation now is completely different to the last 2 years. Michael Gove this week formerly advised businesses that the UK is going down the hard Brexit path i.e. leaving the customs union, single market and with full regulatory divergence from the EU. Under these circumstances it is impossible to run a business like N26 in the UK serving the EU.

> Under these circumstances it is impossible to run a business like N26 in the UK serving the EU. you have this the wrong way round: they are a bank based in the EU that was passporting their German (EU) license into the UK in the near future they will not be permitted to operate in the UK as the UK will no longer accept their EU banking license

That's not actually certain. The UK has no fundamental reason not to recognise EU banking licenses, although it may choose not to, or to recognise it but require additional compliance.

The UK may end up being 'forced' to not recognise such licenses in retaliation if the EU refuses to recognise British licenses. This is quite likely to happen because the EU has a track record of revoking financial licensing as part of trade wars with European countries. For instance they revoked acceptance of Switzerland's financial licenses as part of trying to pressure the Swiss government to cede significant powers to Brussels.

Re: N26 will be leaving the UK

#272

Post by Slartie »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #212
danpalmer wrote: post #11

Businesses pulling out of the UK based on the Brexit process is bad for the UK, and I'm sure this was indeed mainly motivated by N26's need for a UK banking licence, which is a costly and difficult process to go through. However, it's worth noting that they are pretty small in the UK (~200k users). They're very successful in Germany where banking is a very slow, difficult, manually run industry (from what I've heard)…

German/European banking is not so bad, you can transfer money in one business day to any other EU/SEPA country without charge. You also have debit cards that are widely accepted and allow you to pay directly from your bank account, which is also nice. There are not so many banks that offer APIs (only Commerzbank and N26 I think) but there are other interfaces that allow you to export transactions to third party syste…

Actually nearly every German bank has offered API access to accounts to their customers since forever...20 or 30 years or so. It was called HBCI, then it was renamed to FinTS, and it was the most advanced and well-supported API to bank accounts with practically no parallel anywhere in the world. The killer feature was that it was standardized rather well, and every bank supported it, so it was no problem to get programs and apps that could speak to your 5 banks where you have 8 accounts and merge those into a single UI (there were even open-source implementations of the protocol to build bank support into your own applications). You could fetch transactions, but also trigger transactions, with no bank-specific website and - very important - no other middlemen of any kind involved.

Then came all those new app-based banks like N26, and instead of implementing FinTS, they decided to just offer their proprietary app, and that's it. Some later implemented some kind of proprietary API as an alternative to FinTS (maybe FinTS wasn't hipster enough, because it's a bit old-school, XML-based instead of another REST-style HTTP thing with JSON), but those always lacked the core feature of FinTS, which is broad support of the same standard by many banks.

And now we're getting PSD2, which in some ways wants to establish broad (mandated by law) support over many banks again, but not by specifying an API designed to be used by customers, but by businesses only. Hence what we in Germany were able to do as customers for a long time - magically access dozens of accounts at different banks from a single application and without ANY middlemen involved - is now gradually becoming an ability that only corporations will have, because as a private individual it's practically impossible to meet the requirements to get access to PSD2 APIs (even though they basically do the same as FinTS already did for decades), and banks are already toying around with the idea of shutting down their FinTS API gateways somewhere in the future, because that other protocol is legally mandated and FinTS isn't.

Re: N26 will be leaving the UK

#273

Post by _visgean »

Daniel_sk wrote: post #262
alibarber wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've recently moved from the UK to another European country, and whilst I despise the way the politics is going back home - I'm amazed at how much better banking is back in the UK. It's free to have an account and debit card, often with a modest free overdraft. And transfers are really instant. As in I can transfer from Barclays to Santander and by the time I've double-tapped between bank apps the money will be there…

It really depends, Slovakia and Czech Republic usually have very modern banks. I can do everything through the app, I don’t remember the last time I had to go to an actual bank office. Apple Pay / Google Pay is almost everywhere, fast and easy bank-wire transfers, modern and secure apps with face/touch id...

Ehm, in czech republic the bank transfers are still not instantaneous...

Re: N26 will be leaving the UK

#274

Post by kristianc »

scalesolved wrote: post #261
kristianc wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a customer of N26 and Natwest/Barclays I feel that N26 in my experience has won in every category. And if NatWest were the only competition in this market, I’m sure N26 would have done fine. Monzo, Starling and Revolut all have far superior products and market offerings however.

Oh for sure, Monzo and Starling I've heard very good things of. Revolut doesn't have a banking license so hesitant to include them here.

That’s not completely accurate. Revolut has a specialized banking license, which means they can offer a limited range but not investment banking services.

Re: N26 will be leaving the UK

#275

Post by ubercow13 »

Nextgrid wrote: post #227
wikibob wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% Monzo. https://monzo.com/blog/technology Also check out all the awesome tech meetups they host at their new office. There's a very strong and small open source 'cloud' tech community in London where everyone knows everyone. Try hard to meet some people and before you know it you'll have a new group of friends.

Kind of disagree. I was a huge Monzo fan, converted dozens of friends to it and was one of the first ones to get their beta current account (which I immediately started using as my main and only account despite it being in beta). Nowadays however they seem to have trouble making profit, but instead of focusing on their existing customers they pour money into more marketing even though they can’t actually support all…

If you think Monzo isn't profitable, what makes you think Starling would be? They have basically the same product except with more expensive (for them) incentives.

Re: N26 will be leaving the UK

#276

Post by alibarber »

speedski1 wrote: post #179
Nursie wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote time - the only person I know who had an account (I work in London fintech at the moment) never used it and only opened it for the fancy translucent card. He seems to have accounts with all the 'challenger' banks.

Random question, but I'm moving to London in a few months, do you have any suggestions on banks or "challenger" banks I should go with? (couldn't figure out how to DM you, not sure if it's possible on Hacker News)

Transferwise's borderless account might also be worth a look too if you need to hold or regularly spend money in other currencies.

I've moved the opposite way and have been quite happy with it.

Re: N26 will be leaving the UK

#277

Post by scarejunba »

barnabee wrote: post #220
scarejunba wrote: post #61

The comments here are odd. N26 isn't making any political statements. They're just saying they don't want to apply for a UK banking licence now that they can't use an EU one. The response "they're only doing this because they can't make enough money in the UK" seems kind of vacuous. Of course that's why they're doing it. The cost of requiring a UK licence outweighs the benefit of being there. There seems to be some s…

It’s not so much “Brexit didn’t cause this” as it is hard to believe that’s the main reason their business failed in the UK (make no mistake, that is what they are admitting, whatever the reason). The comments are quite reasonably identifying that their statement is conveniently burying the real news with an excuse that will surely be easy to swallow in their home country. Brexit is bad but that isn’t the news here.…

It certainly doesn't look like they're burying anything to me. The official media statement squarely accepts the inability to serve as an N26 problem:

> While we fully respect the decision that has been taken, it means that N26 will in due course be unable to serve our customers in the UK and will have to leave the market

And having some part of the business fail is not some sort of moral failing you have to hide or which they're even attempting to. The rest of their statement makes it clear that considering their growth and number of users it doesn't make sense for them to get a UK licence, i.e. this isn't feasible for them.

I think people are interpreting "We can't do this because Brexit has made this infeasible for us" as "We'd have succeeded if it weren't for Brexit" when it seems quite obvious to me that the trivial interpretation is "Brexit moved us from feasible to infeasible" which just means they were envisioning less in the future than the Brexit-costs would impose and makes no implication really about the width of that Brexit cost boundary. After all, they're still in the US and you need a local licence.

Re: N26 will be leaving the UK

#278

Post by jaclaz »

davidw wrote: post #205
jaclaz wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can tell you that, in Italy, there is not a "standard", in the sense that not all banks are the same, and often one that excels in something is terrible in another aspect. With home-banking these differences are even more marked, some sites have "reasonable" possibilities offered to the customer, some other have next to none (besides checking your account) some have relatively simple workflows some other are so stu…

Be curious to hear the banks' names.

>Be curious to hear the banks' names.

Ow, come on, you know the saying:

[Italian]

Si dice il peccato e non il peccatore.

[/Italian]

More seriously, as said that is single point anecdata, it is perfectly possible that today a similar test would give completely different results.

Re: N26 will be leaving the UK

#279

Post by n4r9 »

doublerabbit wrote: post #135
mytailorisrich wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in the UK, I know all about Brexit and British politics ad nauseam . The point remains that this isn't the key reason behind their decision. I guess it's easier to blame Brexit than to explain to your customers that you're closing their accounts because of good old business. They launched in the UK after the Brexit referendum and they don't even need that bank licence to offer electronic current accounts in the…

It may also be that the EU banking system has customer tracking, the UK does not. N26 relies on customer tracking, so you can’t just withdrawal a large amount of money and disappear. It is all brexit related, why can’t you see that? Why else would they suddenly pack up shop? Unfortunately This is just the first to come.

It's not even the first, in terms of businesses packing up shop. Norton motorcycles is another recent example that springs to mind.

Re: N26 will be leaving the UK

#280

Post by twic »

speedski1 wrote: post #179
Nursie wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote time - the only person I know who had an account (I work in London fintech at the moment) never used it and only opened it for the fancy translucent card. He seems to have accounts with all the 'challenger' banks.

Random question, but I'm moving to London in a few months, do you have any suggestions on banks or "challenger" banks I should go with? (couldn't figure out how to DM you, not sure if it's possible on Hacker News)

Looking more broadly than just challenger banks:

https://www.which.co.uk/money/banking/bank-accounts/best-and...

Top of the list (as it often has been for decades) is First Direct. This is a challenger bank in its own way - it was launched in 1989 to pioneer telephone banking, a disruptive technology at the time! It now has phone and internet banking, but still has no physical branches.

Monzo and Starling, the proper challenger banks, are also rated very highly, taking the second and third spots.

Behind them are some somewhat unconventional banks:

Nationwide is a building society rather than a bank; functionally it's a bank, but it's owned by its customers, rather than by investors. Dates to the 19th century, has many branches, very boring really. My mum banks with them, and she doesn't complain.

Marks & Spencer is an upmarket department store (i swear by their lambswool socks!) which branched out into banking a while ago.

Metro Bank is a perfectly normal high street bank, with branches and so on, but it was founded in 2010. Apparently the last time a new bank was founded before that was 150 years earlier.

The Co-operative Bank is, as the name suggests, a co-operative. It's a bit like a building society, but not. I bank with them. Their website is terrible and their phone customer service has been slashed (although when you do get through to someone, they're great).

Only then do you get to Barclays, which is a classic high street bank - founded in the 17th century, branches in every town, full service, investment banking arm, rigs LIBOR, etc.

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