Many older people over the age of 30 may have never heard of the bank called N26. Started as one of many FinTech startups, the company is now a fully licensed bank based in Berlin. Unlike normal banks, everything runs via app, really everything! Comfortable, fast, young, innovative, hip, hip.
Many young people only have their app bank account at N26. Why do you need a bank consultant, let alone a bank branch, or a telephone hotline? It’s all from the day before yesterday, what old people, right? Just take your phone, open app, do banking, done. Is not that a great new world?
N26 expands globally such as Brazil, USA etc. And had taken another $ 300 million of fresh capital from an investor in January. By its own account, it already has more than 2.5 million customers, and more than 800 employees. 10,000 customers a day would be added, said the N26 boss recently in an interview.
If that’s true, then the disastrous conditions that are now apparent become comprehensible. After all, whoever grows so fast, can hardly wait to expand his infrastructure. And that’s especially important when stealing money from a hack or fishing attack, and when hackers even change their credentials. In a pure online bank, it is of course important that the customer service is immediately available.
Poor customer service
But as hacks had to find affected customers, N26 has just completely discontinued its telephone accessibility. One is really not reachable by telephone any more! By email, customers are referred to a chat. And even there, first a bot responds, so a software. For a customer who was stolen 80,000 euros, was not helped for days. You can quickly fix this if the bank has a branch you can go to, or if someone answers the phone. But yes, if you renounce all that, then the customer of the pure online world is totally delivered.
The portal founder scene has today published a highly interesting article on N26. Which gives a direct insight into disastrous conditions on the basis of several concrete customer problems, so we would like to formulate it. Although it claims to be extremely secure at N26, it obviously manages to steal money from hackers.
It is already unbelievable that a bank in Germany can not even be reached by telephone for its customers. Virtually no real accessibility, no help for stolen money for days, and the question of apparently poor access security. These are damn black clouds over the N26 bank!
Conclusion
Should you advise customers of N26? God forbid. Who are we that we at FMW advise anyone to open an account there. Only one should consider itself as a customer even times. Whether it is good in emergency cases around the own bank account only on a chat by App to be able to fall back, where also is unclear. If one even with a humans chats. And what would actually be, even if the customer’s cell phone is stolen? And the bank supervisors should perhaps ask, if that has much to do with bank, if this is no longer reachable by phone or email. But that’s obviously in the eye of the beholder.
Also published on Medium.