N26

N26 is on this page for one reason, and it is a good one. It holds a full German banking licence, so money in a current account is covered by the German deposit guarantee scheme up to €100,000. Wise and Payoneer safeguard your money, which means they keep it separate from their own — useful, but not the same as being insured if the firm goes under. If you have European residency and a salary arriving every month, that difference is worth more than a few tenths of a percent on exchange.

The limits are severe though. It is a euro account and only a euro account: you cannot hold dollars or pounds in it, and when you want to send another currency, N26 passes you to Wise. And you have to live in one of roughly twenty-one European countries — not the UK, not the US — which rules out most of the people this site is written for.

On the regulator: BaFin fined N26 €4.25m in 2021 and €9.2m in 2024, both for filing suspicious activity reports late, and capped how many new customers it could take on until that cap was lifted in June 2024. Late reporting is a serious failing, but it is not the same as facilitating crime, and the practical result is a bank that has been examined more closely than most of its rivals. One related warning while you are considering European app banks: bunq markets itself hard at digital nomads, but its own help pages say it has to close your account if you move outside the EEA.