When Your Salary Isn’t Welcome in the Bank

Today, someone in a Telegram chat shared a message they had received from the support team of the European neobank bunq. You can see the message in the screenshot.

The customer used the bank only to receive their salary. They didn’t keep the funds there - instead, they immediately transferred the money to other fintech services to exchange it for cryptocurrency.

In my view, this is perfectly rational behavior: you should only keep in fiat (and especially in banks) what you can afford to lose.

But the bank didn’t like it. And it said so quite openly: it needs to make a profit, and accounts that generate only losses will be closed at the first convenient opportunity.

This is what it looks like when cryptocurrencies start taking revenue away from banks. Banks are forced either to drop customers who prefer to store their funds in crypto, or - as bunq did - to push them toward using services that generate income for the bank but are completely unnecessary for the customer. Serving more advanced users is becoming too expensive for traditional banks.

The only problem is that not all employers are ready to pay salaries directly in crypto. So for now, many customers will have to accept the terms imposed by banks.

But only for now.