Bunq review

Bunq is a neobank from the Netherlands. I’ve been an account holder since 2017 (I think) and fully switched in 2018. Recently (the past two years or so), bunq has made changes to their app and policies that I think aren’t very user friendly but I don’t feel like they take customer feedback on their own platform (together.bunq.com) very seriously. For that reason, I figured I’d write a review on my own site.

Don’t get me wrong. While I’m critical of bunq (especially some of the newer “features”), They still provide a banking service that I haven’t found anywhere else. I wouldn’t go to another bank currently.

The Good

At first, I was very excited about bunq. It has all the core features you’d expect from any bank, as well as some cool additional features. Support was also incredibly fast; I’m not sure if it actually was a live chat, but it sure did feel like it.

Three of these features I use daily and don’t think I could do without them:

1. Multiple accounts. I can have up to 25 separate bank accounts, each with their own IBAN. This makes budgeting a breeze.
2. Card switching. It’s possible to change the account connected to a card from the app. Going on vacation? Change your primary card to the vacation account!
3. Dual pin. Cards can have a secondary pin that will make it use another account. Useful to use one card where I sometimes pay from my primary account and sometimes use our shared grocery account.

The Metal Card

In 2020, bunq released a metal card. It was a one-time payment (somewhere around €120 I think) for which you got a metal MasterCard that would be valid for 5 years. This card had some additional features that other bunq cards didn’t have; it came with some purchase protection and also they would plant 2 trees for every €100 that you spent using the card.

I ordered it as one of the first people (I’m founder #153 according to my card) and it’s still my primary card for most purchases.

However, about a year after releasing the card, bunq changed their pricing plans (always unannounced, never received well by the community) to introduce a new SimpleGreen plan that would plant trees for every €100 spent with any card. I was automatically moved to this more expensive plan because I already had a metal card.

After this move, the metal card no longer plants double trees, and I’m afraid to move back to the basic plan because I fear the card might stop working.

When I asked bunq about no longer planting two trees for metal card payments, they explained that it was fine because my other cards also plant trees now. I disagree because most of my transactions were on the metal card so now I’m just planting fewer trees.

The Social Tab

Also introduced in V3 was a new social tab (I forget what they called it) in the app. So now one of the few very in-your-face buttons at the bottom of every screen would lead to a new interface that was practically a proxy for their Instagram feed.

I don’t care about their Instagram feed when banking. I’ll go to Instagram for that, thank you.

The Decline of Support

Like I said before, bunq support used to be awesome. I got replies that felt like the support agent actually had their own personality.

This is no longer the case. Now, when you open a support request (after navigating the endless prompts to just use the forum instead), you’ll get a response from a bot saying that they’re super busy but will definitely get back to you as soon as possible. Then, you won’t hear anything for a few days before getting a response full of marketing clutter and toxic positivity (such as ending every sentence with at least two emoji).

Usually, the response now boils down to “oh ok I’ll report the bug but don’t count on actually fixing the problem”

I understand that providing excellent customer service in a growing business is challenging. However, it really feels like bunq just doesn’t want to hire any customer service reps and instead would rather rely on “community support”. This feels like a cheap exit for a bank.

I remember that at one point bunq mentioned in a blog post that they would start outsourcing support. I can’t find it anymore, but I guess that didn’t work out very well.

Social becomes Friends

Now the bunq app has a friends tab. I fully believe that no UX designer was involved in any phase of the development process for this feature. It’s gone through several barely functional states but I’ll focus on the current state.

Bunq has several friend features, most of which I barely understand.

First, there is the friends list. This is the gateway to all other features. I believe that someone must be your friend before you can do other things with them.

Then, there’s auto accept. Theoretically, this makes it so that bunq automatically accepts payment requests from them up to a certain amount. This never worked for me.

//TODO: more

Support Ratings

Bunq has had some ranking thing on their community for a while. The more you post, the higher your rank becomes.

Now, they have taken it to the next god-forsaken level and will take this rating into account when providing “support”. The app now says “You can improve your level and get even better and faster support.”

There are six ways to gain or lose points:

1. Comment on together (+5 points)
2. Post on together (+10 points)
3. Rate a support conversation (+5 points)
4. Get a 1-2 star rating from support (-10 points)
5. Get a 3-star rating from support (+5 points)
6. Get a 4-5 star rating from support (+10 points)

That’s right! The speed and supposedly quality of support is now based on how active you are on a user forum for your bank. Just want to manage your money and running into a weird problem? Fuck you, you’ll get to wait a week for a response.

If you instead shitpost all over the forum to farm points, you’ll get faster and supposedly better support.

I’m fine with support agents providing ratings to users; people who are often rude to support agents deserve to be placed lower on the queue (up to a point). However, making community participation required for support is a stretch, especially considering that most people probably don’t care about the user forum of their bank.

SOS Support, Sometimes

Because bunq probably understands that their support response time is abysmal, they introduced SOS Support some time ago. SOS support is a special option in the app, and there’s also a phone number for Dutch customers. I’ve never used SOS Support, but they claim to solve your issue within 10 minutes.

In the most recent update, SOS Support has been limited to one support request per month. That means that if you’ve got two urgent issues (which I don’t think is unreasonable to expect), you can only get help with the first one. The second one can wait on the queue for a week or so.