One Audience, No Apologies: Inside bunq's User Obsession

An interview with Joe Wilson, by Sean Murphy

When Joe Wilson tries to count the countries he has lived in, he hesitates for a moment before settling on the answer. Three continents, seven countries, the Netherlands three times. He has just moved to Amsterdam from a life split between Seattle and New York. None of this is offered as a CV recital. It comes up because we are talking about bunq, and bunq has built itself around exactly the kind of life Wilson describes.

Wilson is Chief Evangelist at bunq. His brief, as he puts it, is to bring the outside in: to keep the company close to its users and to talk publicly about what it is doing. He sat on the supervisory board first, then became Chief Operating Officer before his current role. The connecting thread, across all three seats, is that he is still serving the same audience.

bunq describes that audience as digital nomads, expats, and internationally minded professionals. Wilson uses those terms repeatedly. Asked about growth, about strategy, about what success looks like next year, he keeps returning to the same group. When pushed on Revolut and its dominance in markets such as Ireland, he refuses to be drawn. ”We stay focused on building the best product for our user. That's what keeps us moving forward.”

That focus is the story. bunq is now in its third consecutive year of profitability, having become the first European neobank to reach the milestone in 2023 and posting €34.6m in pre-tax profit in 2025, and has surpassed 22 million users across more than 30 European markets. It has secured a US broker-dealer licence, filed for a full US banking licence with the OCC in January 2026, and in May filed for a banking licence in Mexico. By the measure of regulatory bandwidth alone, this is one of the busiest neobanks in Europe. None of that comes up unless asked. Wilson keeps returning to the user.

The bet is that the audience itself is large enough to justify the focus. Wilson cites a figure of around 50 million internationally minded people in this category today, a segment he sees as having significant long-term growth potential as global mobility and cross-border living continue to rise. “The world is not becoming less connected, despite the dynamism that’s out there,” he says. The job, he argues, is to get the product right now, so that when the audience swells, bunq is already there to meet it.

The pitch to that user is built around removing the friction of operating financially in more than one place at a time: cross-border transfers, currency handling, the ability to open a bank account on the day of arrival in a new country, insurance that follows the user across borders. Beneath those features sits Finn, an AI assistant launched in 2023 and now woven through fraud detection, customer support, and internal operations. Wilson is dismissive of any framing of AI as a discrete project, an attitude he says crystallised on a panel earlier this week alongside a traditional banker who wanted to know how usage was measured. “It is fundamental,” he says. “It is like giving you a computer. You have AI now. I want the outcomes associated with that.”

On fraud, Wilson is willing to make a comparative claim. Every bank, in his telling, is now in an arms race with fraudsters, and a company that has been native to AI since launch holds the structural advantage in that fight. The shape of the arms race itself is shifting. Visa's head of risk made the point in a separate conversation this week: the most sophisticated attacks no longer rely on intercepting one-time passwords but on social engineering, where the victim is persuaded to send the money themselves. For Wilson, the principle holds either way. AI is not a project, it is the way the institution operates.

There is a coherence to all of this that is unusual at scale. Asked what evidence he would point to in a year’s time to say the 2026 strategy had worked, Wilson does not reach for a revenue figure. He talks instead about responding to the call: users in Mexico asking bunq to come, the same in the US, the same wherever the next licence application lands.

The strategy works, on his account, because the audience tells it to. For someone who has counted up his own countries on the way through the conversation, that is not a marketing line. It is a description of the life the bank was built for.