BaFin order for N26: What it means, what we’re doing – and why our customers don’t need to worry

At all times, it’s our priority to adhere to all legal requirements for the prevention of money laundering and financial crime.

When we received our banking license in 2016, we became a regulated institution subject to German law. In Germany, the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) is responsible for the supervision of banks, financial service providers, insurance undertakings, and securities trading.

Today, BaFin published an order for N26 Bank GmbH. An order is an instruction from them to improve processes within a certain time frame. The order requires us to optimize existing processes to prevent money laundering and increase N26 staffing levels.

We take this order very seriously and have agreed on the implementation of the necessary measures with BaFin in advance. Ahead of the order, our anti-money laundering team had already taken measures to improve the prevention of financial crime and to address all the points raised in the BaFin order. We are therefore confident that we will implement all requirements ahead of the deadline set by BaFin.

We are working at full speed on processing all pending transactions identified by our systems as irregular or unusual. We’ve already processed 90 percent of these cases and will finalize the remainder by the end of next week.

We will also improve our documentation of existing processes and workflows in accordance with the requirements of BaFin. In addition, we will continue to carry out re-verification of customers where necessary.

Our main goal is to provide our customers with the best possible service while meeting all regulatory requirements. We are therefore also continually increasing our staffing levels. Last year alone, we doubled our team and we will grow our staff by a further 50 percent to more than 1,500 employees by the end of this year. We have also significantly expanded our anti-money laundering and financial crime team and it will continue to grow in the future. In addition, we continuously train our teams to meet high industry standards and further improve the quality of our money laundering prevention processes.

As a trusted customer, we want to assure you that you will be unaffected by the BaFin order. The measures we are taking will help us to become even better at preventing money laundering and financial crime, which remains a top priority for us. We will continue to do our best to ensure that our customers have a seamless banking experience and we would like to thank everyone for their trust and support.