Bunq initiates summary proceedings against Dutch newspaper NRC: Know more

Amsterdam-based neobank bunq, on Monday, announced that it has filed summary proceedings against NRC, a newspaper company, at the Amsterdam court on Monday.

The company’s CEO, Ali Niknam, took to LinkedIn to post the announcement.

“Recently, bunq has been in the news a lot. Unfortunately, all too often negatively. In our opinion, this is regularly on incorrect grounds. With facts that are demonstrably wrong or taken out of context,” says Niknam on LinkedIn.   

Why the proceedings?

The proceeding announcement comes after NRC published an article last Wednesday in which four anonymous former bunq employees say that they were able to gain access to customer data, resulting in abuse easily.

According to the former employees, they were able to view accounts without the employer intervening. They looked at the salaries of colleagues or spied on ex-lovers, reported the article.

“Last Wednesday, there was a new low in the NRC’s coverage. The newspaper decided to publish the names of employees. We immediately and repeatedly tried to get in touch, but after days of silence, we still have not received a substantive response from NRC,” adds Niknam.

Additionally, the article also includes internal messages from bunq’s general chat channel, indicating that privacy concerns existed in the workplace.

The usernames of participants in this Slack conversation were not anonymised when published.

However, upon bunq’s request, NRC adjusted the names of the former employees.

Deputy editor-in-chief Melle Garschagen says, “We heard that these people objected to their username being mentioned. We weighed that criticism and decided to remove the usernames. 

The fact remains that our reporting on bunq is socially relevant and an example of good investigative journalism.”

Security and customer service concerns

The announcement comes around a month after bunq has been the focus of numerous media publications, with concerns raised about the app’s security and customer service.

According to NVB, in 2023, the Netherlands saw as many as 10,000 cases of bank helpdesk fraud and thousands more phishing victims, mentioning bunq in its mail for its account holders.

As a result, the Amsterdam-based neobank has announced some of the significant changes to amp up security.