Reports said that German neobank N26, one of the biggest European fintech companies and has a $9-billion valuation, is finally ready to tackle crypto and equities trading after striving for a global expansion.
It has been reported that despite being an early player in the financial technology boom across Europe, the Berlin-based online bank N26’s global ambitions induced a setback in its diversification of services, N26 co-founder and co-CEO Max Tayenthal said in a Financial Times interview.
However, after exiting two critical fintech markets, the United States and the United Kingdom, N26 plans to “sharpen its focus on its European business” by introducing new products and services to its 7 million customers.
The report said that according to Tayenthal, who admitted that the online bank needs to expand its product universe, N26 aims to launch a crypto trading business in 2022 followed by an equities brokerage instead of “putting flags in new markets.”
Likewise, the N26 mobile app currently doesn’t offer crypto functionality, and features of the upcoming product related to crypto trading are yet to be revealed. N26 announced its exit from the US market in November when it teased additional financial products and services for its European customers.
The announcement said:
“N26 will focus its strategy on broadening its digital banking experience into new verticals to include investment products in the coming year.”
Moreover, the company was hit with several restrictions from German watchdog the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) in May 2021 partly due to its lacking Anti-Money Laundering (AML) controls.
BaFin decreed that N26, which accepted an average of 170,000 new clients per month last year, cannot onboard more than 50,000 customers per month.
Thus, by describing the BaFin-enforced new customer cap as a massive restriction for the growth investor-funded fintech, Tayenthal said he expects the condition to have been lifted by late summer 2022.
Source: Cointelegraph