'customers will be able to easily set up direct debits and make and receive payments including monthly salaries. Without an Irish IBAN, services are quite limited as the market has seen with other well-known fintechs.'
The branch manager is not for a physical customer facing branch, that is the role that will lead the required Irish branch office they need to maintain their Irish IBAN and passporting of their Dutch license.
Ah ok, that's good to know!
For anyone thinking of signing up, it looks like verification takes up to 4 days at the moment, not the 5 minutes they advertise.
My 5 mins turned into 24 hours, then at 24 hours I got an email saying it was taking longer. Got onto their support after about 40 hours and the auto bot said the current verification wait is about 3.9 days.
Can only imagine they got more opening request than they expected and to validate the address is going to be manual unlike in other countries where you have central databases, or the address is noted in the ID cards.
They didn't even ask me for a proof of address during signup yet! They wanted a passport photo and a photo of me.
Has anyone had issues with IBAN not being accepted?
Bank Of Ireland Insurance are telling me they are unable to process the change to my bunq IBAN.
the only comment from them is, “that’s not going through, is this a revolut account?”….
Am I right in thinking that Bunq only does Maestro? No Visa or MC debit?
Any issues with this for a daily driver?
Edit: just realised their mastercard "credit" is really just a prepaid credit card.
I was going to ask the same thing ... no Visa/MC debit card offering is a bit odd. I'm guessing the Maestro card wouldn't work in Ireland?
You would order the Mastercard credit card, not the Maestro debit.
Even though it's a "credit" card, it's not a credit card like you would think. It's pre-paid, so you can never spend more than the balance in your account, i.e. you never actually get credit.
Bunq could do a better job of explaining this somewhere as I also found this very confusing in the app.
Yes, not very clear at all. I was hoping to use a sub account for a Lotto syndicate, but the National Lottery does not accept payments from credit cards, so that's not going to work.
You could try a digi card, when they were called virtual cards they were showing as debit so maybe you get lucky.
It might take a few days (or knowing Irish Companies a few years) before all systems do understand there is a new bank in town.
They should be able to take the Irish IBAN without a problem.
Maestro cards are on their way out, the only reason Bunq is issuing Maestro as primary is that their local Dutch user base needs Maestro because most shops there do not accept master/visa cards and only take Maestro/VPay due to the cost structure.
Maestro will work fine in Ireland, most shops accept them without a problem, you only get into issues when you are trying to use them online as most Irish websites are not taking Maestro remotely.
But for that you have the Mastercard which as said allows you access to the funds you have in the account you linked it to. In effect it acts like a debit card but is coded as credit card so that you can use it without problems for car rentals or hotels where in some regions you can't use debit cards.
The Mastercard does not give you a credit limit, but for Bunq your credit limit is the account balance. Therefore, it also does not attract stamp duty like a credit card but rather like a debit card, there is no separate credit account.
I created a digicard last night, the app suggests that it's a credit card too.
Too bad, but at least it means you get to have a trip to a shop to play Lotto ;-)
Same for me ... the first Digicard shows up as a credit card and if I add a second card it shows up as a Bunq Travel Card (also credit).
I sent them a message on chat asking about debit cards, waiting on an answer.
Is there a benefit to Bunq for offering pseudo credit cards over plain old debit cards? You'd think they'd offer the choice of both.
Haha, yes, but it breaks our current Lotto syndicate system of doing everything online and making everything easy and transparent!
Maestro and Debit cards give them a flat 0.02€ interchange fee (in other EEA countries banks can get up to 0.20%) per transaction while consumer credit card gets them 0.30% of the money spent.
So yes, credit card is a little bit better for them than debit cards.
But maintaining both debit and credit card infrastructure if both behave the same way in the end (i.e. access to your current account) makes no financial sense, so credit card coding is the only thing available because of the benefit of a credit card for both interchange, acceptance and chargeback process.
Conceptually this feels like a step up on Revolut, but the app really does take some getting used to. The badges stuff etc just needs to go away.
The social features, the badges, the tree planting, and all that stuff stops me from using this as my main account.
The features are great, but this "playful" banking approach aimed at teenagers is not really what I need from my main bank.
It won't stop me using it, it just means I end up clicking in the wrong place a few times as things are not exactly where you'd expect them to be.
I just noticed they let you customise the look of cards in Apple Wallet. This is such a basic but amazing feature, I have a big complaint that my 2 AIB cards look identical in the wallet and you cannot see the number on them until you select it.
Is it possible to sign up for this and get a virtual Maestro card and then a normal Mastercard for at home? Currently in Amsterdam and it's wrecking my head carrying cash cos of places not taking Visa/Mastercard!
One other advantage is a decent limit on transfers. No more 5k, then another 5k, wait until the next day nonsense you have to put up with Irish banks.
Open for corrections but to the best of my knowledge Bunq no longer supports adding Digicards to Apple Pay, only the physical cards, it might be different for Android.
Maybe someone with Android could see if they can create a Maestro Digicard and add it to Google Pay?
I started to add a Maestro Debit card and one of the blurb screens says you can add it to Google Pay. I didn't actually try it, but they say it should work. (It did not mention Apple Pay)
I hope they've got rid of the part of verification where you had to take a picture of your fingers.
They IBAN seems to be accepted, but the BIC is not. I don't know why we even need to use the BIC on a DD.
All I had to do was a photo of passport / driving license, and then a video of your face where you have to say a number on screen.
Are you using BUNQIE22XXX ?
BIC should not be needed for Direct Debits, I never understand why companies are still asking for it, IBAN is all their bank needs.
That used to be an extra verification step for certain transactions that required additional verification. Have not seen that one in a while.
