June 10 2024 One billion digital nomads are predicted to be roaming the world by 2035. European mobile bank bunq aims to go with them, says Chief of Staff Bianca Zwart There’s a handy feature on the bunq mobile banking app that allows users to review and share experiences that they’ve paid for on their card. Want a great café in Zagreb where you can drink coffee for hours over a laptop without getting the hard stare from staff? Or perhaps a fab shabby-chic pension in West Berlin that rocks Weimar-era style at pre-War prices.
They’re the kind of crowd-sourced recommendations on which the world’s new generation of worker-travellers thrive. Liberated from conventional employment routines, they’re highly mobile, constantly updating, digitally well-equipped – and creating a demand for services fashioned in their own image. Products like bunq, the ’bank of the free’.
Founded in 2012 in the Netherlands, in 2023 it became the first neobank in Europe to turn an annual profit (€53million), driven by a huge surge in customer demand over the previous 12 months. More than 12.5 million users are now logged on.
“We’ve seen a shift in people working remotely and living internationally. Home, work, travel are all just nicely blending in,” says the bank’s chief of staff Bianca Zwart. According to Statista, more than 35 million people – roughly half of them millennials (28-43 years old) – had already placed themselves in the digital nomad employment category in 2.