After over a decade at the helm of German neobank N26, it’s safe to say CEO Valentin Stalf has learned a thing or two.
N26 has raised over $1.8bn since its founding in 2013 and has 5m customers over 24 European countries. But the journey hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing.
The company’s tussle with German financial regulator BaFin — which imposed a growth cap of 50k customers per month along with a €4.25m fine in September 2021 after the neobank failed to implement effective money laundering controls — was a humbling experience for a scaleup that had once been growing at breakneck speed.
In 2019, at the height of ‘hypergrowth’, N26 tripled in size — growing from 500 employees to 1,500 in less than a year, onboarding 80 people or more every two weeks. Two years later, in October 2021, it raised a bumper Series E funding round of $900m at a valuation of $9bn.
Fast forward to 2025: N26 has been free of BaFin’s growth restrictions for over a year, and it’s now focused on making up for the years of flat growth — but more sensibly this time, Stalf tells Sifted.
“We now put more weight on excellence in what we do,” he says.
“[The cap] had a massive impact on the company’s development, and that’s why we now need to catch up again. We have a really big focus on getting back on top of mind for customers and to be present in the market.”
Product
While N26 started out as Europe’s first pan-European digital bank, it’s now one of many on the continent. The pressure to innovate and move fast is high, while also staying compliant — a delicate tightrope all neobanks walk when pushing into new products or markets.
Since N26 broke free of the growth cap, it’s rolled out several new products and features.
The big updates, according to Stalf, include the launch of N26 sim — a series of mobile plans offering unlimited calls and SMS within Germany, free roaming within the EU/European Economic Area and between 10-30GB of data, depending on the plan. Stalf says N26 will also launch mobile travel plans for N26 customers this summer.
The neobank isn’t alone in its move into the telecoms industry. Competitor Revolut recently launched a mobile package with unlimited texts, calls and data and 20GB EU and US roaming in the UK. It plans to roll out telecom services in N26’s main market of Germany soon.
But Stalf seems unswayed by the competition. “Every penny that goes into awareness of our category helps the whole industry to grow,” he says.
Other products N26 is looking into include shared bank accounts for families, including accounts for children, and friends.
Stalf also sees a looming opportunity for neobanks in accounts partially subsidised by the government, like France’s private equity savings plan (PEA). With these accounts, French tax residents can invest up to €150k, and if no withdrawals are made in five years, capital gains and dividends are exempt from income tax. Adult children still living at home with their parents can also open an account with a ceiling of €20k.
There are, however, other classic banking areas the company has been slow to cash in on, like business banking. Banks can charge more for business accounts, but can also offer adjacent services such as invoicing and expense management, opening them up to more recurring revenue streams.
While other neobanks like Monzo have seen strong revenue gains from business banking, Stalf says it’s not coming to N26 anytime soon.
“[Business banking] is not top of mind for us in the next 12 months, but in the next five years I’d definitely say that business is one of the super interesting areas to expand [into],” says Stalf, adding that the company offers accounts for freelancers and has a beta business service for 100 SMB clients.
Mortgages is another area where N26 is keen to take things slow. Dutch fintech bunq rolled out mortgages in 2021, and Revolut is planning to launch a mortgage product this year, starting in Lithuania.
N26 rolled out its first mortgage offering in the Netherlands in 2023 under an independent brand, Neo Hypotheken, to “test it and see how it goes,” says Stalf.
He adds that the Netherlands is considered a low-risk market, as around half of all owner-occupied mortgages are state-guaranteed. N26’s mortgage business currently has a loan volume of €1bn.
“We’ve learned over the last 10 years that credit is not a business you can push into the market,” says Stalf. “If you do a credit business in different regions, you always need to be very proactive with regulators, and then there’s a lot of questions. There is a lot of complexity in Europe, because the markets are still not that harmonised.”
Case in point: Manager Magazin reported in June that N26 has run up against BaFin once again, this time over its mortgage business. The regulator is reportedly demanding that N26 adheres to (stricter) German, rather than Dutch, risk management requirements for mortgage lending and customer screening.
Stalf declined to comment directly on the matter, but a company spokesperson said in a statement that “as a regulated financial institution, we maintain constant and frequent dialogue with the various regulators in Europe regarding all relevant business areas.”
N26’s growth
N26’s competitors have far surpassed it across many growth metrics.
UK neobank Monzo achieved £1.2bn in revenue and a pre-tax profit of £60.5m in the period of March 2024 and March 2025. It also onboarded 12m new customers.
Meanwhile, in 2024, Revolut’s revenue grew from £1.8bn to £3.1bn, while pre-tax profits surged to £1bn. It also added 15m new customers.
N26’s accounts look much less promising by comparison. The fintech announced its first profitable quarter in Q3 2024, with a net operating income (profit minus expenses and taxes) of €2.8m. It projected its annual revenue would grow by 40% to approximately €440m by the end of 2024, which Stalf says the company achieved, though the company has not yet released figures for the full year of 2024.
N26 did disclose that it currently has 5m “revenue relevant” customers: those who have gone through its know your customer (KYC) checks.
Christian Nagel, general partner at Earlybird and an early investor in N26, says that the gap between N26 and its competitors has widened, not just because of the growth cap, but because its developers were focused solely on compliance for two years rather than shipping products.
“It took some time to get [the company] into the mood again of launching a product not just every other year, but every month and now I think they’re in a good frequency again,” he tells Sifted.
Others in the industry think that N26 has lost relevance over the last few years. Several experts Sifted contacted said they couldn’t comment on the company as they haven’t looked at its products for a while.
Simon Taylor, founder of Fintech Brainfood, a newsletter and podcast on finance, AI and the future of money, says the growth cap had a significant impact on N26’s perception in the market.
“They had no story to tell, no news, and struggled to capture attention. Meanwhile Revolut has gone on to dominate the continent,” he says. “There was a time when Monzo, Revolut and N26 were mentioned in the same sentence but that’s less and less the case now.”
Fundraising
But N26 has recently started hitting the headlines again.
Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that N26 is seeking to raise a €400m Series F round at a reduced valuation to offer a partial exit for its investors Coatue Management, Third Point and Dragoneer Investment Group.
The company, according to the report, has also been discussing a structure that would allow these investors to carry over some of their shares into the new round, meaning they won’t get the 25% preferred return upon exit they were promised when they first invested in 2021.
Stalf declined to comment on the liquidation preference and added that N26 was not actively looking to raise at the moment but he “cannot exclude” raising money within the next 12 months if an opportunity arose. Naturally, he says, the company is chatting with investors on a quarterly basis.
“There were some rumours in the media that we have talked to some Middle East funds and so on. Obviously you talk to the Middle East and US and Asian investors. It’s just normal, because some of the biggest investors around the world come from the Middle East,” says Stalf.
Whether N26 could hang onto its $9bn price tag is another matter.
“I don’t think we are at the valuation that we had in 2021, but the fundamentals of the company are much better than in 2021 in terms of revenue,” says Stalf. Revenue has more than doubled in the years since: in 2021, it was €182.4m; in 2024, N26 says it achieved gross revenue of at least €440m.
“I think the company is fundamentally better today than it was in 2021,” adds Stalf. “As a founder, I try to focus on the fundamentals of the business and not get crazy with always thinking: is the valuation better or worse?”
Leadership at N26
Navigating the twists and turns of a business forces any CEO to grow and mature — or at least that’s what one would hope.
Stalf has been criticised in the past for being “professionally immature” and a leader who couldn’t listen to experts. Between 2020 and 2022, the company struggled with high turnover following a showdown between N26 management and employees who tried to set up a works council, only to have it squashed by the company.
Earlybird’s Nagel says that Stalf and Tayethal have improved significantly as leaders having had to navigate “tough times” and various management changes.
“Valentin and Max have had a lot of experience now in terms of how to manage and retain people. I think coming from hypergrowth to kind of stalling, BaFin and so on — they’ve gone through various phases and I think in the end that makes them much stronger leaders,” Nagel says. “I would say that’s a very positive element which we haven’t seen with all the founders in our portfolio.”
Stalf himself says he’s grown a lot as a leader in the last decade — and with the help of coaching, one of the biggest areas he has improved on has been people management.
“I’m a completely different manager than I was 10 years ago, particularly when it comes to communication, be it with external stakeholders, the supervisory board, investors, regulators,” he says.
“In my position, leading a successful fintech company in Europe, you get a lot of exposure, and you’re exposed to a lot of smart people and it’s all about the learning curve. But in the end it’s also about the team you build around you.”
The company hired two new C-suite members in 2024 to get some fresh ideas and mindset into the business: Juan Bongiovanni, former head of growth and marketing at neobroker Trade Republic, was appointed CMO in January; and Mayur Kamat, formerly senior vice president and global head of product at Binance, was appointed its chief product officer in May.
“I can make a difference with overall strategy or giving some hints on product, but the fundamental business is run by the 1,500 people that work for us and with us,” Stalf added.
996: hot or not?
That means he doesn’t need to follow a 996 lifestyle anymore.
Back in the day, Stalf would have had no qualms about working evenings and weekends for his startup. He recalls a time during the first year of running N26 in Berlin when he emerged from the office on a Sunday afternoon and was “astonished” to see beaming sun and people frolicking on the streets.
But his attitude to work these days is quite different.
“Working 24/7? You can perhaps do that for a time period. Maybe you can do it for a year or two years. Maybe some do it for three or five years. But for me, for longer term sustainability, especially in the role I’m in, you need to have your downtime as well because in the end, it’s all about the quality of work you do,” he says.
“And for me, it’s also about the quality of decisions,” he adds. “I can do meetings from nine to nine. I can do a meeting at 1am for a couple of days until I maybe cannot physically do it anymore. But for me, it’s much more important to take the good decision instead of many decisions. That also doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work hard and be driven.”
Perhaps that is another way that leaders evolve over time. When you first begin a startup, having your nose to the grindstone all day every day is what is required, but once you’ve scaled, built a fully functioning machine, you can afford to take just a little step back.
“I personally like to go into nature, maybe to the mountains. That’s where I gain the freedom of mind that helps me to make better decisions and be a more balanced person at work,” he says. “If you’re a leader, you need to be balanced. You can’t bring all your emotions to every meeting.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/n26-ceo-valentin-stalf-getting-back-to-growth/
