Neobank bunq Launches Cash Back and Savings Interest

European neobank bunq has added cash-back and savings bonuses to its offerings designed for digital nomads.

bunq now offers 1% cash back on food and drinks to Easy Money and Easy Green users, and 2% back on public transportation to Easy Green users, the company said in a Tuesday (July 18) press release.

The neobank also now offers 3.71% interest on U.S. dollars and British pounds, and 2.3% interest on those currencies to its business users, according to the release.

“This way, bunq’s location-independent users can grow their savings in whichever currency they prefer,” the company said in the release.

The challenger bank also announced Tuesday that it has introduced a way to help users track the carbon footprint of their purchases and has partnered with data-driven restorative platform veritree to plant at least 5 million trees a year, helping its users boost their green impact.

bunq is continuing to rapidly scale across Europe. It now has 9 million registered users and over €4.5 billion (about $5 billion) in user deposits, the release said.

Its user base has grown from 5.4 million to 9 million in just over a year, while the user deposits have doubled in four months, per the release.

Inflationary pressure has led to an increase in the number of personal financial management tools and budgeting apps on the market, offering to help struggling consumers keep an eye on their spending, bunq CEO Ali Niknam told PYMNTS in an interview posted in October 2022.

One challenge modern consumers face is that spending electronic money is harder to keep track of than spending physical cash, Niknam said at the time.

“Digital money just doesn’t have the same feel to it as physical money,” Niknam said. “We’ve been trying to re-create that same type of experience digitally. … We’ve always expanded on ways to make [money] more tangible and more intuitive.”

bunq was launched in 2012 and is the second largest neobank in the European Union (EU) next to Revolut. In April, bunq applied for a New York banking license with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), aiming to bring its business to “digital nomads” in the United States.