bunq: Bank of The Free

Please introduce yourself and your company.

Hi! I’m Lexy, API Advocate at bunq, Bank of the Free. 🌈

We are revolutionizing banking to provide our users with total control over their money. Anything you could want from your bank and more is already available in our app! You can even choose how your money is used, share expenses with three beers in your hands using just your voice, and never pay exchange rates anywhere in the world!

Many bunq users are developers, which we are very proud of. Their absolute favorite thing about bunq is the ability to programmatically access their own money and do literally anything they want with it.

Does your company offer any APIs?

bunq offers an open RESTful banking API with the richest API reference you have ever seen. All in all, our API has around 300 endpoints, which allows for absolute creativity and flexibility when it comes to building fintech apps and additional features for business solutions.

Along with the usual capabilities that bank APIs support like reading account transactions and initiating payments, our API also allows for the following:

• order, activate and replace bank cards;
• create, update and delete monetary accounts;
• link cards to monetary accounts;
• update pin codes and country permissions;
• retrieve and update cvc2 codes;
• request and schedule payments;
• manage account information;
• download attachments.

Developers can choose the preferred way to start with the bunq API:

• Call the API directly
• Use our SDKs
• Import a starter’s Postman collection along with the sandbox and production environments
• Use Tinker (i.e. connect to sandbox by running a command and switch to production by scanning a QR-code; it’s also the easiest way to create test users)

Not sure which is the best in your case? Take our quiz!

How are companies using your API?

The most common use cases for our API are accounting software and various business management systems. See the image below for some examples.

Some companies also use the bunq API for card management (e.g. ProActive, an expenditure management solution) and internal payment automation (e.g. Roamler, an international crowdsourcing platform).

We also have the best community in the world who create apps for everyone to use. bunqDesktop built by Gregory Goijaerts is a vivid example.

What are some of the growth / marketing tactics your company is using to attract developers?

The best thing a company can do to get its API used is document it well, communicate its clearly defined value, and make it easy to get started with it. While traditional marketing techniques are great for attracting the attention of the target developer audience, it is the knowledge and tooling a company builds around its API that converts.

That’s the philosophy that we are following and which helps us grow our developer community. By the way, feel free to browse and subscribe to bunq Developers’ Corner. 😉

What are some APIs that your company uses and how are they being used?

We are using our own API for our app. Besides, we integrate with APIs that help us create secure world-class payment experience. In particular, we use the Onfido API for identity verification; the Checkout, iDEAL, Sofort, Barzahlen, and MasterCard APIs for payments; and the TransferWise API for working with the real currency exchange rates.

Anything else that you would like to add?

I’d love to hear about your experience with the bunq API! Feel free to email me with any questions or suggestions at [email protected].