Joe Wilson does not want you to think bunq is here to save crypto. The opposite, almost. “Our purpose is not to drive adoption of crypto,” he told me when we sat down at the Dutch Blockchain Week Summit. “Our purpose is to serve users and serve the community.” That crypto adoption happens anyway, he says, is a side effect. And yet, sitting across from him, I kept circling back to it as one of the more convincing adoption stories in European banking right now.
Wilson is bunq’s chief evangelist for Europe, a job title that sounded like a joke until he explained it to me. “It means you have the responsibility of basically telling the story of the company, but also taking the outside world in as often as possible,” he said. “My job is transparency. To make sure the information moves both directions.” bunq, for the uninitiated, is the Dutch neobank with 20 million users and a habit of turning up everywhere its target customer looks.
| What you need to know |
|---|
| 1bunq, Europe's second-largest neobank with 20 million users, added crypto trading to its banking app in 2025. |
| 2Chief evangelist Joe Wilson frames crypto adoption as a byproduct of serving users, not the goal itself. |
| 3The bank lets first-timers buy as little as €10 of Bitcoin to try it, and 57% of them come back to buy again. |
| 4Through "bunq as a service", the bank now opens its license, KYC and compliance stack to partners like Blockrise. |
Everything through one lens
Ask Wilson how a bank steeped in compliance and regulation makes itself appealing to a crypto crowd, and he refuses the premise. The bank does not start from regulation. It starts from the person. “Everything we do, everything we care about, the primary objective is to listen, pay attention, and do what a user wants,” he said. “Compliance, regulatory, all that, it’s a means to an end for someone out there who has to pay a bill, or get a kid to school, or find a new job.”
The user bunq has in mind is specific, the same internationally minded crowd that Dutch exchanges like Bitvavo are courting under MiCA. “We focus on digital nomads, expats, international people who work across multiple countries,” Wilson said. He counts himself among them. “I’ve lived in seven countries, three continents, with a family of six, and I’ve restarted a lot of times.” The pitch for the app follows from that life: “It’s not for everybody. It’s for the audience I just described. You can open the account in five minutes, and you can have traditional banking plus access to crypto, stablecoins and stocks, all in one place.”
“bunq as a service”
The newer move is wholesale. bunq is opening its banking license, KYC and compliance stack to other businesses, a product it calls bunq as a service. Wilson’s example lands squarely in crypto. “We have an anchor partner called Blockrise, which lets you lend against your Bitcoin,” he said. “Now Blockrise can offer that lending, and within the same app put a bank account that the Bitcoin can go straight into when you want to convert to fiat. It’s all in one place, because they use bunq as a service.”
He is unworried about scale, in the way only someone running 20-million-user infrastructure can be. “It’s a select number of partners, there’s an integration process. We’re a 24/7 company with 20 million users. We have a massive infrastructure that already scales. It’s going to be a while before we run into those problems.”
The number that matters
Here is the stat that reframes bunq’s whole crypto play. When the bank added Bitcoin, it found its users were not the institutional crowd. They were first-timers, testing the water with pocket change, the everyday buyers that even Litecoin creator Charlie Lee sees as the future of Bitcoin payments. “These guys are like, if I could just buy 10 euros of Bitcoin so I can try it, where can I do that?” Wilson said. “And that’s what we can do. You can buy 10 euros. And by the way, 57% of the people who buy 10 euros of Bitcoin in the bunq app do it again.”
That is adoption measured in habit, not hype. A bank lowered the barrier to a tenner, and most of the people who stepped over it came back for a second step. Wilson is happy to call that growth for the ecosystem, but he keeps it in its place. “That is a byproduct of our purpose. Our purpose is to serve those individual users who have their own problems. Turns out they’re interested in things like crypto.”
The credit gap nobody mentions
As an American running a European bank, Wilson has a sharp read on why money behaves so differently on each side of the Atlantic. “The Netherlands is a very non-credit-based society, and America is a heavy credit-based society,” he said. “You have to have credit to succeed in the US. You build it starting from high school. And the Dutch people are like, what the hell are you talking about?”
The practical fallout is brutal for anyone who moves. “If I’m a European and I want to move to America, guess what, I don’t have any credit history. There’s so many things I’m missing the day that I land.” That gap, the friction of a life lived across borders, is exactly the wound bunq is built to treat.
“I don’t need to look smart”
Wilson saw the soundbite coming as he said it, and so did I. When I asked how bunq cuts through hype to reach the famously level-headed Dutch consumer, he kept it plain. “We’re not a company with a massive corporate agenda. We’re very flat. We’re all about the user. We talk to 2,500 users every quarter directly, plus customer support data, plus research.” Then the line. “I don’t need to look smart. I just need to make sure we understand each other.”
It is a small thing to say and a hard thing to do, and it doubles as a thesis for crypto’s next phase. Strip out the jargon, lower the stakes to ten euros, and let people try. “If that keeps happening in the crypto space, if we can understand each other,” Wilson said, “adoption will grow.” Not because a bank set out to grow it. Because it set out to be understood.
Recorded at Dutch Blockchain Week 2026, Johan Cruijff ArenA, Amsterdam. Watch the full conversation above, and follow @Cryptofocus_NL on X for the rest of our Summit interviews.
