N26's European banking licence: verified, and what else is not

N26’s claim to a full European banking licence traces to a specific line in BaFin’s own public institution database: institution ID 10145827, licensed 18 July 2016. That citation carries more weight than most of what fintechs publish about themselves, because it comes from the regulator’s register rather than the company’s own pages. For anyone comparing N26 against Revolut on the question of whether this is actually a bank, that’s the fact that answers it.

The rest of N26’s public record splits cleanly between what’s confirmed the same way and what rests on the company’s own word.

Confirmed, and traceable to N26’s legal imprint rather than a promotional page: the bank is incorporated as N26 Bank SE in Berlin, carries commercial register entry HRB 271697 B at the Amtsgericht Charlottenburg, operates under German law, and answers to both BaFin and the European Central Bank through the Single Supervisory Mechanism. Home jurisdiction, governing law, and regulator sit on the same footing as the banking licence: verified, dated, sourced against public registers rather than N26’s own account of itself.

Everything past that point is N26 describing itself, without a third party confirming it independently. Deposit protection is a case in point. N26 states that deposits are covered up to 100,000 euros through the Entschädigungseinrichtung deutscher Banken, the German deposit compensation scheme banks are required to join. That’s an ordinary and expected claim for a licensed credit institution to make, but the source on file is N26’s own support article, not a listing on the scheme’s side confirming membership.

Ownership follows the same shape. N26 Bank SE sits under N26 SE, a holding company, and investors named in the imprint include Tencent, Valar Ventures, Third Point Ventures, and Coatue. What isn’t disclosed is who holds what, so the ownership map stops at names rather than percentages, and a reader can’t tell from public filings alone how much weight any single investor carries over strategy or governance.

Data handling and security carry the least specificity of all. N26 says data processing happens within the EU without naming which data centres, and describes itself as GDPR-compliant with biometric authentication and 3D Secure on card payments, again without an independent audit or certification cited alongside the claim.

Set against Revolut, N26’s core claim stands up. Among neobanks pitched as alternatives, N26 is one of the few whose banking licence is checkable against the regulator’s own database rather than taken on the company’s word. The gaps sit further down the list, in ownership detail and data-centre specifics, not in the licence that makes N26 a bank in the first place.

For the current standing across both axes, Jurisdiction and Independence, and every source cited above, the live dossier is at /listings/n26/.