A pioneer of digital banking

N26 was founded in 2013 reimagining the retail banking experience for today’s mobile lifestyle. N26, or Number26 as it was first known, aimed to make banking easier and more transparent for millions around the world. By 2015 it had launched its products for the first time, unveiling their free N26 digital bank accounts and N26 Mastercards in Germany and Austria. At this stage, regulation had started to ease and cloud banking became an option, a game changer for digital banks.

Move to cloud

Regulators loosening restrictions in Europe, and their growing acceptance of cloud helped to inject impetus into the digital banking market. Digital banks that had little or no legacy technology could take a digital first approach by leveraging the agility and scalability of cloud and modern core banking platforms. This is exactly what N26 did.

Armed with a German banking license from the European Central Bank obtained in 2016, the bank took the conscious decision to build in the cloud. This move helped them stay agile and grow - quickly - propelling them to the top of the digital banking stakes.

Platform requirements

N26 had three key requirements when choosing a modern cloud-native banking platform provider:

• Speed to market: N26 needed to be able to scale quickly and easily, at the same time offering absolute stability to customers, essential for establishing consumer trust.
• Flexibility and agility to adapt and quickly add new products or features.
• Strong emphasis on customer experience: because tools, services and features are regularly revised and improved to respond to customer needs. The underlying platform needs to be able to meet these needs.

N26 chose Mambu’s cloud banking platform to make the transition from newly-launched single-market entity to Europe’s first pan-regional mobile bank.

Pan-European expansion

N26 built and launched on a new platform in October 2016. The launch was quick, cost-effective, and instrumental in helping N26 achieve its strategic goals. It supported significant growth in customer numbers while maintaining that all-important  stability. In mid-2016, N26 had 200,000 customers, and it has grown this customer base to more than 8 million in 2022. Tens of millions of transactions are executed per month, demonstrating the scalability of the platform in terms of both customers and transactions. The new composable architecture also enabled significant geographic expansion. Since it was launched, N26  has steadily expanded into a number of European markets and is currently active across 21 countries.