N26 reaches 5 million customers, including 250,000 in the US

via TechCrunch

Challenger bank N26 has reached 5 million customers. In 2019 alone, N26  managed to add more than 2.5 million customers. And the company’s growth rate seems to be accelerating, as N26 reached 3.5 million customers in June 2019.

That represents an addition of 1 million customers during the first half of 2019 and an addition of 1.5 million customers during the second half of 2019.

One reason N26 is growing at a faster pace is that the company is still expanding to new markets. N26 has been available all around the Eurozone for a while. People living in the U.K., Denmark, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Liechtenstein, Iceland and Switzerland can also open an N26 account.

But N26 also expanded to the U.S. during the summer of 2019. It represents a huge market opportunity, even though N26 faces competition from local players, such as Chime.

Over the past five months, N26 has managed to attract 250,000 customers in the U.S. The company operates under a sligthly different model in the U.S. N26 has partnered with Axos Bank, a white-label partner that manages your money, while N26 takes care of all the interactions between customers and their money.

Banking regulation is complicated in the U.S., which makes it difficult to launch a challenger bank across all 50 states without a banking partner.

There are now 1,500 people working for N26 across five offices — Berlin, New York, Barcelona, Vienna and São Paulo. Up next, as you might have guessed with the mention of São Paulo, N26 plans to expand to Brazil.