bunq: My not so happy review after bad experiences


I was a very happy bunq user until… today. The huge advantage of bunq is that you can create online credit cards and that all subaccounts also have their own IBANs.

The plastic cards work most of the time but, unfortunately, they do not always work. I had more than one situation where I wanted to pay with the maestro card but it didn’t work. Unfortunately, I could not detect a pattern here since there was even a maestro sign on some of the card machines.

Also, not all companies accept the Dutch IBAN. That’s actually not ok as you should be able to use every account in the EU, that’s what we have SEPA for. But Google, for example, does not send you AdSense earnings to the Dutch bunq account when your Google account is located in another country. And I had long arguments with other companies that did not want to send money to my Dutch account or did not want to take money from that account. This is time-consuming. It is probably not bunq’s fault but it is a problem if you plan to use bunq seriously.

What really concerns me is that there are some hidden costs that you have to pay in addition to the high monthly cost. I pay 7.99€ per month, which is actually a lot more than I would have to pay for any other bank account. N26 still has a free account and also Spaces, sub accounts, without an IBAN though. But if you want to add cash to your bunq account, you will have to pay 1.5% of the sum you want to add, at least if you want to add more than 100€. This is written in light grey in small letters in the interface, so light and small that I did not see it. Such a shame, and the support has been extremely unfriendly here. I guess it is more expensive to get a new paying customer than to refund a customer to prevent him from leaving, but this is a lesson that bunq still needs to learn.

To sum up, I cannot recommend bunq, even if there are some features that I really like.

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