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N26 will be leaving the UK

n26.com

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Re: N26 will be leaving the UK

#291

Post by tsukurimashou »

Glawen wrote: post #163
_n_b_ wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

N26 is also very successful in France, whose banking industry is--I can confirm--very much slow, difficult, and _very_ manually run. They can charge fees for accounts because their fees are still so much lower than the incumbents they're displacing. (And you can do stuff without having to talk to your bank counsellor, at your one specific branch, in person... how novel!) So I can see how their model wouldn't be very…

French banks are slow, but they provide good services. When i lived in the UK, i had only a debit card (maestro). If you wanted a mastercard you needed a credit card account where you needed to manually balance at the end of the month. Mind you this was 10 years ago, when the UK was Just introducing PIN code for every card transaction, a security feature found in France since the 90s. In France you get mastercard as…

French banks are very bad, from my experience at least and I've had 6 different banks over 8 years, got kicked from one because I was working at a startup and the boss gave checks to employees with no money on the company account, so the checks would get rejected a few days / weeks after the salary arrived (which was usually one month late and not at a fixed date which already made it difficult with bills). The catch is, the company account was on the exact same bank as me, in a small village with just a few employees. They kicked me knowing that the company was shady and they were helping the guy. That was just one example I could go on for a while.

Re: N26 will be leaving the UK

#292

Post by andrewjdavison1 »

Nursie wrote: post #76
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)…

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.

You have exactly described me. I have them all, but the only one I use actively is Revolut and Starling.

Re: N26 will be leaving the UK

#293

Post by Nextgrid »

ubercow13 wrote: post #275
Nextgrid wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Starling has other sources of income like their enterprise services which allow businesses to connect to the Faster Payments network: https://www.starlingbank.com/paymentservices/

In addition they have business accounts which don’t have any of the costly features like interest, free cash deposits, etc so they’re profitable for Starling as they profit off the interest (especially relevant for business accounts as they might hold high balances keeping money aside for taxes and VAT) without giving out many costly features like cash deposits (the only overhead there is support and foreign ATM withdrawals).

Re: N26 will be leaving the UK

#294

Post by tpush »

briandear wrote: post #224
parsimo2010 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the Leavers' arguments was that the UK wouldn't be subject to the EU's regulations. They claimed that the EU rgulations were stifling and created too much of a nanny-state. Johnson's parliment is pretty much duty bound to create an environment of reduced regulation, otherwise they would be reneging on one of their most important platforms. Things like blatant crime should still be regulated, but creating an ea…

Didn’t the EU actually regulate the shape of cucumbers and the output of tea kettles?

No they didn't: https://wayback.archive-it.org/11980/20200128075524/https://...

Re: N26 will be leaving the UK

#295

Post by Zenst »

greatpatton wrote: post #191
ars wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's saying the reason they failed is nothing to do with brexit and everything to do with the fact that no one knew about them. But they are blaming brexit instead of their own failure.

No, it has to do with the fact that when you have a smaller customer base and additional cost when running on razor-sharp margin, it doesn't make the cut. So yes it has to do with the Brexit as this is the reason for future additional cost, especially today when EU negotiator said that it will be very unlikely for the UK to get financial services equivalence. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/feb/11/barnier-t…

They started in the UK in October 2018 - more than two whole years after the UK voted to leave the EU.

It's as if they never knew what the UK people voted for!

Re: N26 will be leaving the UK

#296

Post by ianai »

sveme wrote: post #264
ianai wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really, as a pure outsider, I think anytime you redo a vote on something like this as many times as they did you increase the odds of success (leaving the EU) to 1. People will eventually switch their vote just to not have to vote any longer. It’s not necessarily a ringing nor deep endorsement of the change.

There were two referenda on EU membership in the UK in the last fifty years.

If you leave out the snap election(s).

Re: N26 will be leaving the UK

#297

Post by bpfrh »

seemslegit wrote: post #32
btzll wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you expand? People get their accounts locked for no reason?

Well there was probably a reason but they weren't told it and with N26 being online-only had noone to turn to, you can do a google/twitter search for someone getting police called on them for showing up at their Berlin HQ/Backoffice trying to get some answers.

To be fair, that is nothing unique to N26.

In fact in austria easybank is also a bank that afaik only exists "online" and easybank is much older than n26.

Edit:

Forgot something

Re: N26 will be leaving the UK

#298

Post by ubercow13 »

mpweiher wrote: post #148
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)…

>in the UK we have generally very good banking infrastructure Have you banked in both the UK and Germany? I have, and it was no contest, UK was horrible, expensive, slow and unresponsive.

This is a strange comment to me, though I haven't banked in Germany. Current accounts and transfers are almost universally free in the UK. Transfers are so quick that I transfer money to my account from my phone as I'm standing at the ATM with a queue behind me, knowing it will be there instantly.

Which parts were slow and expensive?

Re: N26 will be leaving the UK

#299

Post by rolltiide »

alibarber wrote: post #260
bbbobbb wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really depends on the country you moved to. Banking in Germany will be much shittier while what you describe is norm in other countries for example.

Not Germany, but one that in many other ways is very efficient and forward thinking. I think the banking issues are more historical and due to having a small population with generally conservative attitudes towards money and financial institutions. But my point is that N26's offering is just not going to cut it across the whole EU(+UK), and any risk introduced by Brexit (or anything else that might happen) probably w…

yeah, in the US here is no expectation of a same day free transfer between banks. Only a "maybe" in the same bank. And you can sometimes game the ACH debit system to make things occur in "technically the same 24 hour time period".

there are a couple tiers of paid wire transfers, but still no guarantees that you will have liquid settled cash in the same business day.

the mere concept of the SEPA system in the EU is pretty nice

Re: N26 will be leaving the UK

#300

Post by davidw »

jaclaz wrote: post #278
davidw wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're banks; large corporations. It's not like anyone's naming an employee there or something.

And I do understand that things vary. One time, for instance, I even had a package arrive quickly through Poste Italiane.

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