N26, not really a bank by any stretch of the imagination.
I live and work in Spain but am British by birth. I have a UK bank account but with Brexit looming on the horizon I decided it would be prudent to open a Spanish bank account.

I did my research over a period of a few weeks and decided to go for N26 because they seemed to offer one of the best overall packages. Just how wrong I was will be explained in the following paragraphs.

I applied for my account around the beginning of April 2020 and was accepted within literally minutes. This surprised me as I was informed on the sign-up screen that the process would take 24 hours. Anyway, the sign-up process was complete, I had been accepted and the account was ready to use. My metal (literally) debit card turned up some weeks later so everything was going simply fine.

Covid 19 had raised its ugly head at the beginning of the year and as with many countries Spain went into lockdown and almost all employees throughout the country were eventually laid off or furloughed. I have worked in Spain on contract for many years and so I was entitled to ERTE (a benefits payment system for people who are paying into the system). This is around the time that I began to suspect that N26 was not a real bank.

My company’s accountant informed the ERTE social department of the bank account numbers of all the employees where I worked, including my new N26 account number. Some time passed and everyone except me began receiving their furlough payments. I just assumed that because mine was a new account that it may take some time to get things set up correctly. Some more time went by and my colleagues started receiving further ERTE payments. In fact, everyone that I worked with was receiving payments except for me.

I subsequently opened a chat session on my N26 app and asked if there was any reason that I was not receiving my ERTE payments into my account. I was absolutely stunned to find out that N26 do not have an agreement with the Spanish social security departments to handle these payments. A bank that is not authorised to have benefit payments paid into it by a government body is, to my way of thinking, sadly lacking a vital service to its customers. I did some fast research on this problem and sure enough there were many N26 customers complaining about this lack of service.

Then, just a few days ago I entered a main Spanish bank and tried to pay some cash into my N26 account. I was told by the teller that N26 is only listed as having one address in Spain and that (again) they DO NOT have a certain agreement with the main banks and therefore I cannot pay cash into my account.

So, once again, yesterday I found my self on a chat session with N26 customer service and found out to my utter amazement that it was true; I cannot pay cash into my account from any of the main Spanish banks. However, I can pay cash in via the Post Office, the bloody Post Office. Please bear in mind that we are now in the year 2021 and not 1981. I spoke to two customer service people after I finally got around the computer bot that aparently always starts the chat. The second person I spoke to was helpful, but the first person refused to connect me with a supervisor and eventually cut me off.

The customer service from N26 is, in my opinion, absolutely dreadful. They are reading from a script that they are not allowed to deviate from.

So, to finally cut to the chase, N26 can not receive ERTE benefit payments from the Spanish government and because they only have a single presence in the whole of Spain, I cannot pay cash into my account.

I’m now beginning to wonder just what other services they can’t provide for my 16.50 euro per month.

N26, not really a bank by any stretch of the imagination.