Dive Brief:
- N26 is leaving the U.K. market and closing all of its accounts based in the country April 15, the German digital bank said in a statement Tuesday, citing Brexit.
- The move will affect all of the bank’s “several hundred thousand” customers in the country, an N26 spokesman told Bloomberg. All money will need to be transferred or withdrawn by that date. Payments received later than April 15 will be returned to the sender.
- Britain served as N26’s first expansion market outside the European Union. The bank launched a presence there in October 2018, more than two years after the country voted to leave the EU. N26 launched in the U.S. in July and has amassed 250,000 users there and more than 5 million globally, it announced last month.
Dive Insight:
The bank won’t be able to operate in the U.K. with its EU banking license because of the timing and framework laid out in its withdrawal agreement.
The majority of N26’s U.K. staff will move into new roles with the company, the bank said.
"Although we will be leaving the UK, we will continue our mission to radically transform the global banking industry through innovation and the power of technology and design to build a bank the world loves to use," Thomas Grosse, N26’s chief banking officer, said in Tuesday’s statement. “This means growing within the European Union ... building our presence in the US, one of the most attractive global banking markets, and expanding into new countries.”
The bank said its customer base has grown 43% since it stood at 3.5 million last summer.
