How bunq Cracked Profitability

I mean, look, the answer is in the question, right? So it's culture, voice, the stories of the company, what's happening with it, how you translate between product and audience, things like that. But because of my history with the company, I've held a couple of roles here prior to coming back to do this, I also have access to pretty much any of the things that are going on, if there's a way I can help. So that's kind of what it means. I prefer these lesser-defined, specific roles when you can get them, because that gives you an opportunity to focus on impact, as opposed to hours or structure or something like that.

I don't know. I think there are a lot of words that, when you think about these things, "chief storyteller" was kind of very US, doesn't really work. "Advocate" sounds a little legal. So there were a few things that came in, and ultimately "evangelist" was a good space in between. I think "big mouth" was on the table at some point. But in the end, you just find something that's as descriptive as possible, but then again, we're trying to describe it again in our conversation.

Let's not say religion. We're not going to mix those things. That is not the way this is revered. Just to be clear, all listeners, please note: this is not a religious context.

As a company, I think you want to look at growth, right? It's important that everyone understands, if you're listening to this, you're generally interested in fintech, that's what your audience is about, and maybe you're interested in banking, and the way these two things merge, because all of this is the digitisation of everything. But look, this is a company, an organisation, a place driven by the user. There are a few companies I've been involved with, and if you look at my history, you've seen a lot, that basically have an obsessive relationship with the person who's using the app. And so every decision, everything that goes on, we're busy with growth, we're busy with expansion, because it's in demand. We're being asked, "Can you go here? Can you open this up here? Can you go there?" The whole US expansion began based on user demand, people living between the US and Europe, between these two different places, saying, "Look, it would be so much easier if I could get this experience over here. How soon can you do that?" So let's go figure that out.

Yeah, the history of that goes back a bit, because it was the first-ever profitable neobank, amongst all the great stories we can tell today. And I guess Europe leads a bit on neobanks, because in the US it's a bit different. But why were we able to do it? I'm going to repeat the same answer a few times if you ask questions like this: this obsession with the user put us into a model where we were looking at the value of subscriptions very early on. So we leaned on the subscription model, because it's what people were asking for, "I'd rather have a single price and have everything wrapped into that, and not have a bunch of crap sticking out; I want it simple." And that allowed us to expand, and then we grow on the back of that. So I'd say that, plus, this is, in some cases, and I don't limit this to neobanks, but I'll say in fintech and also neobanks, there's a very VC-driven model where you take monstrous amounts of investment, and your board is complicated, and you're driven by a lot of models. In this case, we have a founder who's on his third success story, so he knows how to build companies, and he wires and constructs the machine in a way that he knows will work. And we're driven through technology, so we take that path through the tech. Essentially, if you look at our revenue and our profitability, when some of the other neobanks were at this level, if they ever crossed it, and some didn't, the number of employees was triple or quadruple what we have. So there's an efficiency wired in, on top of this user obsession.

It's simple. You can go to bunq.com and look at the subscriptions, or you can pick it up in the app. There's a free version, there's a small-cost version, and it goes all the way up to like 20 euros a month, where you can literally get everything included. And that has a volume of the types of things our users would do. It's important to zero it back to: who are these users we're talking about? If I can just push this particular point, we are not a bank for every single consumer in the world, or every business customer in the world. We centralise and focus on a very particular demographic, and that is the digital nomad, the digital expat, someone who's living internationally between different systems. And we build technical solutions inside a banking app that serve that audience, so we can create things that are specific to them. At some point you may ask me, "Well, why would you succeed in the US when someone else hasn't?", and I'm going to come back to that same answer when we get to that point as well.

Yeah, we've applied, it's public knowledge, we've applied for that banking licence. We're in that process with the OCC and the Fed and the regulatory authorities that create that. And in the background, we're setting up what I'd deem the machinery that allows you to run a bank inside the US. Those things are all happening in parallel.

Yeah, so I think there are maybe two to three things happening at the same time. We're going to go a little macro-industry and then back into bunq, if that's okay, because I think it'll make more sense. The term "neobank" is a fun term, right? Because it sort of suggests there's this thing unlike everything else. But I don't think we're so incredibly new as we once were, as an idea. People use these, for many more, it's becoming their primary bank rather than their secondary bank. And what's happened over this decade of evolution with neobanks is that the demographic who uses these is also evolving. So it's no longer just your high-risk university student, or this one specific group, it's broadening, and they're ageing, and it's becoming a broader demographic that wants to use these banks. So that's a macro thing, the neobank world has evolved, it's not the same, you can't think of it as it was five years ago, seven years ago; you have to think of it in current terms. Then you look into the US and say, "Okay, what's underbanked, underserved, where can you offer something in the market?" Same answer as before: there is a particular demographic that we are specifically good at serving. This digital nomad, digital expat, international-living situation, we are specifically dialled into the needs of that audience. So our entry into the US is in demand from that audience, and will serve that audience in very specific ways. So it's not a strategy of going to the US, exploding, competing with everyone and trying to make the biggest noise out there. It's very much a precise approach of high value to a specific audience. And I think that will make one of the biggest differences from what people have tried in the past. We feel pretty confident in it.

Undoubtedly, I fit into that category. And I should say I'm not alone in this, because I have both a spouse and a family that we have dragged across the planet, seven different countries, three different continents. I've had kids who were raised internationally, who sort of see the world as home. A few of them went back to the US for university, because it was exotic compared to where they lived. So we kind of exist in that space with some depth and knowledge, I'd say.

Thanks for the softball. Anyone who has lived in multiple countries has encountered the problems we encounter. You set up a bank account for the first time, if you go to the US, it's a credit problem, because you don't have any credit history, you can't get a credit card, all sorts of things. So these things exist. bunq's focus on both technology and the depth in a local market, as well as our history with our current user base, allows us to create technical solutions. So as an example, and I'm not professing an exact feature we'll have, I'm just giving an example of what I mean, if you'd been living in Europe for a long time and you moved to the US, what would you need to land? You'd need an account, probably a savings account, and a credit card. The last one is really hard to get; the first two might be hard to get, because you have no credit history in the US. We, however, have connections, a single system that works across both sides, and we can turn that on in five minutes. So that's basically the types of things that audience requires and needs, and that we'll be able to fulfil.

So there are a couple of layers. One is regulatory. You have KYC, I'm speaking to non-banking people, so, "know your customer." You have money laundering, you have all these things you need to guard for and against, to make sure your users are protected and that you have all the technology around them that allows them to just make life easy, and not get caught up in all those pieces. So there's regulatory, and then there's technical. For us, at least, regulatory can be more complicated than the technical. Our technology is unique to neobanking, in that everything is built here, it is our platform, it was designed here, it's refreshed constantly, it moves, we own it end to end, every piece, it's us. We are the technical centre. If you come and hang out in our headquarters, you'd feel way more like you were in a tech company than in a bank. It is who we are as a company. So there's a technical solution, there are nuances to ACH versus IBAN and things like that; those aren't impossible, they take time. But then there's the regulatory, which means you have to be able to allow this technology to be used across those things. So I'd say those are some of the hurdles you cross, and they take a few steps to do, but we see both sides of the ocean open to this currently.

I don't want to overstate my influence, it's not a tiny little company anymore. But I'd think that, more importantly than myself, it's that particular user demographic, which is well-defined and well-known. You see me looking around, because everyone in this company will ask you: "Well, what does the user want? Do we have data that's proved that?" So Joe's opinion is good if it matches what everybody else wants. But I think we're able to define that based on the needs, like I described. So the answer is maybe, but more importantly, it comes back to the whole of the users we serve.

I mean, that depends on where you work, right? It has more to do with a company question. But you could ask me, from a personal level, how it is that we'd live in multiple places and pull this off and have these jobs.

It's a time-zone question, man, more than anything else. Your challenges are logistics, am I in the right time zone? Did I get that right? Are we all tuned in? Did we get the four-hour, eight-hour window where we can all talk? It's just about doing that. Really, it's a time-zone question. Because for me, and at bunq, the work is the work, it's not affected by where I am. I want to land in Amsterdam on a regular basis, because I want to connect with people; I think there's a high value to office time as well as remote time. But ultimately it's a time-zone question. I actually don't find it difficult, maybe I'm just super well-rehearsed; maybe it's that you go through this long enough. But if anybody wants the pro tip: it's all in the calendar. Everything is in the calendar. I can live through a well-managed calendar and have high discipline in how I operate, and also focus time specifically on force-multiplier activities rather than general stuff, and I can make it work pretty much from any time zone in the world.

Let's go back to your comment about a strong track record. No one has a strong track record. This could be controversial, but I think we all fill ourselves with our résumés. We get convinced we're great at something. We get a time and a place, we do things, and we either deliver or we don't. And if you can stack up enough "yes, we delivered," then maybe you have past history that says you could possibly do it again. When you come to a place like bunq, which is known for the quality of talent it has, you sort of feel like someone has let you into Harvard and they didn't know who you were, it's that smart. So I think you always have to kind of prove yourself again. To your question, can you do it being younger, rather than sitting on your experiences in the past? Yes, absolutely. People are doing it all over the place. The number of digital nomads is increasing year over year. Despite the complications, and let's say the dynamic international situation we all live in right now, we still see this increase in people who want to live and work around the world. And there are more and more companies, maybe it's COVID, I don't know, that say, "Look, I want the talent. How do I operate with the talent? How do I get that talent to work for my company if it sits over there? Okay, let's just figure that out." I see more and more flexibility in that than I ever have. But you also see the side where people are requiring the in-office days and things like that, so that's all kind of coming crashing together right now. But, long way to get back to it, if you were younger, what you do is you set your mindset and say, "I'm going to do it like that," and then you'll find your way through. Our life experience, my wife and I and our kids, we didn't follow a company that sent us around the world. We decided we wanted to be somewhere. We decided we wanted to live in India, so we went and lived in India, and if the company cooperated, great; if not, we worked it out on the other end. So you make these decisions. Our model of living is experiences over possessions, that's our lifestyle. That's a long-winded answer, but it's why I get to sit and talk about being a digital nomad: because we made that decision a long time ago.

I mean, you're asking a question from what I consider to be a very old-world point of view, if you don't mind. It's like, if I was at a giant brick company, looking at them, going, "How do you judge these guys if they're not here in the office?" It's more that there's a set of requirements, a set of metrics, a set of outputs. People are delivering or not delivering on these things, and you build a relationship. Even if you lived in the same office and you had a company with two or three days in the office required, there's quite a possibility that 50% or 70% of all your time would still be in meetings like this, right? So I think this is a skill set that just exists in the workplace today, and if you don't have it, it's probably time to go, you've got to be able to work digitally. That's my best answer for that.

So maybe the shorter answer is this: focus on the company. If this is your choice in lifestyle, focus on the companies that get great feedback on this. There's nothing you can't know, right? You can search, you can find anything you want to know about a company, from Glassdoor to whatever, you can put these two things together. If you just show up one day at a company and you're mad because they don't measure you right as a remote worker, you chose the wrong company. You could have chosen differently. So keep that in mind.

100% a record. Absolutely.

Yeah, one of the inside views of this is to understand that we were pushing AI, as we call it. For everyone listening, "AI" is a terrible name, it doesn't really mean anything underneath it; there's a lot of detail and technology we could talk about, and we need to separate gen AI and agentic AI, all disclaimers in place. So we were working on this, we were building this, long before it was ever really cool, before LLMs. A lot of it came out of need. We have this remarkable recruiting process and we get extremely high-quality talent, and our general view was to lift these people up rather than just cycle everything out. So the components of automation, and then eventually prediction and machine learning, and then into what we know as AI and LLMs, were all built from an internal perspective of how to barely grow the organisation with fewer people and greater output. So it starts that way. And it starts on things where, I don't know the stories people tell, like, "I woke up on Saturday and vibe-coded a cool app, and by Monday the whole company was AI." Our experience was very different: you have to launch it, present it to consumers, go through this process. And we had multiple layers of this over years, to get it so it could be as reliable as it is. It's across everything we do. Certainly you can see the gen AI components taking over 90%-plus of customer support, with 90%-plus satisfaction ratings. It's involved in the way we code, the way we market, HR, all these things. It works its way across all of what we do. But I'd say we grew into this, rather than just waking up late to the game and jumping in. So we're very much an OG on AI, as this goes, and it's because we're such a technical organisation.

I wouldn't quote any numbers, not because I'm dodging your question, as much as I don't want to put a number on it. I just don't think it would help. You ask for improvement; I can tell you achievement. 97% of all customer support frontline, first line, is handled by what we consider gen AI, or AI. That's a 90%-plus satisfaction rating. So if you put those two things together, you can imagine that you've moved it into this direction, and it's going to get better and better. Probably in your history, you know we've had experience with the Dutch regulator around money laundering, and we were promoting our AI capabilities on that. So we push into this edge, but I don't want to put a hard number of "it used to be that, and now it's this," because I don't know if that's the story, or the thing you need to understand about this technology yet.

Yeah, it's a 90%-plus satisfactory rating. I think there are things you should automate and things you shouldn't automate, right? There are things like, I don't know, take ethics and morality, that type of category, I don't think that is ripe for automation by any means. I think there are repetitive tasks that are ripe for automation, and in any customer service situation there are a lot of repetitive questions, a lot of things you can do, but there's a human-in-the-loop component required at some point for certain things. So we try and titrate that, tune that, so it works in the right balance. Sometimes we get it great, sometimes we might not get it right, and we'll get feedback on that, trust me, we're a consumer company. So you're still moving, and it's still early days, even with what we've done. It will get better and we will get better, but it still takes some more time to get this tuned just right. Again, if we slice gen AI and agentic, we get to a different conversation.

Sure.

Well, I wouldn't say "lately", but if "lately" is within the last six months, I'd say, yeah: speed of growth, expansion, the ability to serve additional markets, the ability to serve the demographic we focus on. So pointedly, it influences that pretty much daily, you want to make those decisions on how you can do it. Consider marketing: how do you improve marketing by X percent at some point, because you've mastered, I wouldn't put "mastered", you've improved on your ability to use this technology. I struggle with the linguistics component of it, because at some point we'll all recognise AI language; we'll see it using the English language and be like, "I don't know where that came from." So that human-in-the-loop component is very important. But there's a lot more that goes on behind the scenes, it doesn't have to do with writing, it has to do with placement and algorithms and the ability to sort into a marketing auction of whatever. I think those are all places where there's incredible opportunity, and it informs our strategy constantly.

Yeah. I think we had an early brand of maybe the bad boy of banking, or something, I don't know how you'd want to phrase that.

All the challenger banks took this position of revolutionising banking, and now we're basically setting the standards for banking, the traditional banks need to operate the way we operate, with the speed and so on. Does it affect how people see the bank? Well, I think with size and scale and number of users, you have a greater responsibility, and you have to recognise that responsibility. That goes into trust, security, all the things that are important to watch out for, for a user. So I do think we feel the weight of that, in a healthy way, we feel like we are responsible, we have to be trustworthy, we have to get everything tighter and tighter at all times. So yes, it does, I do think that's changed. But the premise of who we are as an organisation and what we stand for, we continue to stand for this audience, we continue to stand for the change that banking and financial technology has to represent as we evolve. Like, in the world you were just mentioning, we were one of the first banks to offer flexible staking, that's because, guess what, they asked for it, it's something they wanted. So that is a responsibility we have. And as we grow, I think it's important that we never, and I don't think we can, because this culture is so wired in, let go of the voice of that user to direct what is right, what is wrong, and where it has to go. But I do think we feel the weight of that trustworthy responsibility as we grow, definitely.

Yeah, you talk to them. You literally speak with them. You have conversations, you run surveys, you understand them. You don't pretend you know something, or just do it in an abstracted, data-only way. You have a set of users who are on your app, you have a set of users you desire to have a relationship with, and you engage with that group and listen to what they have to say. That is a fundamental. I don't know how I can urge it more, because everybody pitches this "user obsession" thing in the tech world, they talk about it. I've been engaged with over 50, 60 organisations, and I can't find one that works like this, that has the obsessive relationship, in a good way, in a healthy way, with their user, the way that bunq does. Really sitting and understanding and connecting at a level where, what does it mean? What do I want? What does it have? So I'll stop there, it's a bit abstract, but there's a cultural machinery in the company that says we can't do shit unless we can prove it's good for that user. We're not going to change the chairs in the lunchroom unless somehow it's better for them.

Your statement, not mine. But there's a, yeah. So our company operates in this kind of unique structure. The company is divided up into ownership. So forget hierarchies and think ownerships: what do you own, what's the output? And there are people in the company who literally own our understanding and our information based on the user. So they are constantly running these things. Anything we want to do, from a feature to a conversation we want to have, is tested, understood, represented by real people. So we have a step-by-step, clear process to reach out to users, get their feedback, and get them to teach us what the next feature needs to be, rather than us leading them. At times you may think, "This is where we've got to go," and then you go, and they're like, "Hmm, I'd rather this button just worked right," and you're like, "Shit, I'd better engineer that before I do the other thing." So there are a lot of things you have to pay attention to. But in our company, this ownership structure helps you understand where that sits and how it works.

Yeah. Of those companies, I had two exits and three failures. And you always learn more from your failures than your successes, hopefully, wise people learn more from their failures than their successes. With success, sometimes you were so good it worked, and sometimes you were lucky, both are equally possible when it comes to a great success. Failures are often your fault. And those failures, those experiences, those mistakes, those assumptions, the ego, there's a layer of things that go into that that have taught me a lot about approaching what I'd do with bunq, and where I can influence, or where I should offer my experience. I think that's the hard lesson that brings you to "What am I good at, what am I not good at, know thyself." And I think that's part of how I bring it to bunq. I don't know if I answered your question, I think I did.

No, there are a few things I wish I'd paid attention to, is probably what I'd say. Maybe it's ego, maybe it's assumption. I have a wonderful talent for convincing myself that I'm right, and I had to learn how full of shit I was on that. So for all of you who think you don't have that skill, one of the greatest things is to learn how wrong you are, or to learn to pay attention to that wavelength that comes in and says, "Oh man, this is me," and you're like, "Wait a second." So I wish I could have tuned that in years before I did. I wish I could have tuned in how I lead and manage people. In the early days I was very "do what I say, let's go, blah blah blah", I was living off energy and charisma. And later, I lived off operations and details and structures and things that could scale. I believe in systems. In the beginning I believed in energy, and now I believe in systems, I think systems scale and grow and can outlive me or anyone else. Energy is a great way to infuse a system, but the system is more important. So I wish I'd known these things. I can think of at least one of the failure companies that would probably be a huge success if I'd had some of this experience back then.

Well, your podcast looks at fintech, but I think it also looks at scaling companies. So I'd say, amongst all my feeling about how we build structures and details, and how we probably survive and grow a company through its operations, this is to the entrepreneurs out there: just don't forget what you got into it for. I used to say, if you don't have a dream, you'd better get one, because it will be this driving force in your life. And I think this is an important point to make: if anybody wants to be an entrepreneur, and they're listening, and they're scaling, and they're in the middle of some shit situation they just don't know the way out of, just keep grinding. Because some of the greatest successes I've ever had were out at the other end of a real shitstorm of things I couldn't stand, until I got there. So I hope people can see through that.

Yeah, okay. That sounds like I was being cut out.

Yeah man, thanks Ian.

Absolute pleasure. Cheers, man. Bye.