What Is N26?

Put simply, N26 is the best online bank for most people.

N26 offers a host of great features, including:

• Free worldwide ATM withdrawals: Wherever you are in the world, N26 Black and N26 Metal members can withdraw from any ATM at the inter-bank exchange rate with zero fees, as if you’re still at home.
• Free international money transfers: Send an unlimited number of money transfers to friends, colleagues, suppliers, customers–all for free.
• An extremely powerful app: Toggle online payments and spending limits, reset your PIN, pay with Apple Pay and Google Pay, receive real-time transaction notifications, and a lot more–all in the N26 app.

There’s a lot more to N26 than just this, but this brief overview give you a general idea of what you can expect as an N26 user. Now let’s look at N26’s insurance policy.

N26’s Travel & Medical Insurance Plan

The N26 insurance plan comes as a standard feature with N26 Black, N26’s premium account, and N26 Metal, its super-premium account. You can read through the entire N26 insurance policy here, or get the highlights of the plan here:

1. Medical expenses up to an unlimited amount (no deductible).
2. Travel cancellation insurance up to €5,000 per trip (10-20% deductible).
3. Flight and luggage delay insurance up to €400 (no deductible).
4. Stolen cash insurance up to €500 (no deductible).
5. Stolen mobile phone insurance up to €300 (€50 deductible).
6. Extended warranty on purchases up to €500 (€50 deductible).
7. Car rental insurance and public transportation accident insurance.

Yes, you read that correctly–N26 offers unlimited emergency medical coverage. If you have an accident while you’re on the road. N26 will cover you no matter the expense. This is a remarkable feature, and is single-handedly enough to thrust N26 into the upper echelon of insurance providers.

Another great thing about N26’s insurance plan is that it also covers your life partner or spouse. So if you have N26 and something happens during your trip, both of you will be covered by the policy.

But these are really only the tip of the iceberg. It’s hard to get a feel for how strong an insurance policy is when you don’t see it compared to anything else, but take my word for it when I say the N26 insurance plan is very, very strong.

As you’ll see in our comparison tables below, it even blows away the big insurance providers like World Nomads, and it does so at 1/10 of the cost.

The Costs

Since the N26 insurance plan comes standard with both N26 Black and N26 Metal, the cost to you depends on which of those accounts you select. Here’s a breakdown of the three N26 account options and their costs.

Introducing: SafetyWing

SafetyWing is a $37 monthly travel & medical insurance plan with impressive emergency medical and dental coverage, $3,000 of lost luggage coverage and a $250,000 maximum limit.

In other words, it offers some of the best value of any travel and medical insurance plan on the planet.

I’m a huge fan of SafetyWing, since they’re decluttering travel insurance in a serious way. Plus, the only real weakness of the SafetyWing policy is their travel delay coverage. The good news is that N26 has excellent travel delay coverage, so if you follow our recommendation below and get both SafetyWing and N26, you’re all set.

There are the highlights of SafetyWing’s policy:

*SafetyWing’s policy has a maximum limit of $250,000, which means they won’t pay out more than $250,000 in any single coverage period. The items with no limit listed above are also subject to this $250,000 maximum limit.

SafetyWing vs. World Nomads vs. N26

Most digital nomads and frequent travelers are familiar with World Nomads’ insurance plans.

And if you’re really savvy, you know that N26 offers some pretty impressive insurance on their N26 Black and N26 Metal cards, too.

So here are the highlights of how N26 and World Nomads stack up against SafetyWing, using a healthy 30-year-old from New York as our example. The green boxes indicate which policy offers the best coverage for that particular item:

*The SafetyWing and World Nomads prices are actually for a period of 28 days, though I’ll assume they’re monthly prices here for simplicity’s sake.
**If a deductible amount is not listed, that means there is no deductible for that item.

You probably notice an interesting trend in the above table: either SafetyWing or N26 is the best in every single item category.

As a result, I want to introduce a new option:

The SafetyWing & N26 Combo

SafetyWing and N26 both have really impressive insurance offerings.

Yet each of them leave you with a few gaps.

That’s why I recommend getting both a SafetyWing insurance policy and an N26 Black or Metal card to ensure you’re more than covered in every scenario.

To show you what I mean, I’ve combined the two columns of the above chart to show you what a SafetyWing + N26 insurance plan looks like:

Scenario Planning

If you’re still not convinced on why combining SafetyWing and N26 is the best option for digital nomads and frequent travelers, let’s run through a few scenarios to see how each of these companies would respond. In each scenario, assume you’re a healthy 30-year-old traveler from New York.

Scenario 1: Emergency Dental Treatment

You’re hit by a car while crossing the street and need to see a dentist immediately.

Winner: SafetyWing
Runner-Up: N26

Scenario 2: Getting Mugged

You touch down in a new country, grab $600 from the ATM and head downtown.

It’s late, and your taxi drops you off a few streets from your hotel, but you don’t mind—it gives you a quick chance to explore the neighborhood.

But before you know it, four men appear out of nowhere and knock you to the ground. You resist, but there are simply too many of them. Within a few seconds, they take off with your iPhone, wallet and MacBook.

Winner: N26
Runner-Up: World Nomads

Scenario 3: Lost Baggage

Your airline loses your checked baggage, which had your MacBook, iPad, DSLR camera, drone, and other valuable items inside. After several weeks of keeping you in limbo, the airline finally admits that your bag is irretrievably lost.

Winner: SafetyWing
Runner-Up: N26

Scenario 4: Personal Liability Insurance

The mailman slips on the icy sidewalk in front of your house, breaks his arm and decides to sue you. While backing your car out of the driveway, you bump into and kill the neighbor’s 100-year-old tree. You accidentally cause some damage to the lobby of the hotel where you’re staying in Paris. Let’s assume any of these three scenarios run up a bill of $10,000.

Winner: SafetyWing
Runner-Up: N26

N26 Black vs. Revolut Premium

One more comparison worth making is with Revolut, which offers a travel & medical insurance plan with its Revolut Premium and Revolut Metal plans. We did a major comparison of N26 vs. Revolut a few weeks ago, and discovered that the biggest difference between the two policies is that N26 includes quite a few more features, some of which Revolut users need to pay to access and some of which aren’t available to them at all. Here’s how the two plans compare:

The trip cancellation insurance alone puts N26 a step above Revolut, and when you add in the extended warranty on purchases and reimbursement for stolen cash that N26 provides pro bono, it’s clear that N26 provides the better insurance offering than Revolut.

Weaknesses Of N26 Insurance

No insurance plan is perfect, though, and N26 is lacking in two areas:

1. Emergency dental: N26 offers €250 of emergency dental coverage, which is better than many providers, who don’t offer dental coverage at all. However, emergency situations like getting hit by a car or falling down the stairs will normally require more than €250 of dental work, so we don’t feel this is enough. The dental coverage is also out of balance with the rest of the N26 policy, which is extremely generous.
2. Lost/stolen items: If your phone is stolen, N26 will pay you back up to €300; if you’re mugged within 4 hours of withdrawing cash from an ATM, N26 will cover your loss of up to €500, too. Other than those two scenarios, though, N26 doesn’t cover lost or stolen items. This is not uncommon for a travel & medical insurance provider, but it is worth pointing out so that you know the limitations of the policy.

These are the only real weaknesses of the N26 policy. As we saw in the Scenario Planning section above, N26 actually ranks in the top two on all four scenarios we look at, despite it being compared to plans that cost 3-20x more.

How To File An Insurance Claim With N26: My Experience

I was recently taking a flight from Beirut, Lebanon to Cairo, Egypt with Middle East Airlines.

I booked the flight about 2 months in advance, but 9 days before the flight, I got this email informing me that my flight would be nearly 6 hours delayed:

I was secretly thrilled: I knew I had a good chance of getting some money back for the flight delay. As I mentioned above, N26’s insurance policy provides up to €400 in compensation for flight delays.

I opened up the N26 app to see what documents I’d need to provide to claim the flight delay. There are only five documents that you’ll need, and all of them are very easy to get:

1. Your travel documents. A screenshot of your original ticket, which is probably in an email from the airline or travel agency you bought it from.
2. Proof from the airline. If the airline sent you an email about the delay, take a screenshot of the email and forward the original to n26warranty.nl@allianz.com.
3. Proof of purchase with your N26 card. Take a screenshot of the transaction from within the N26 app on your phone or desktop.
4. Your N26 account information. This is just the name on your account (probably your name), your IBAN and your BIC so they can transfer you your compensation. You can get all this in the N26 app under My Account.
5. Your N26 You or N26 Metal ID. You can find this by logging in to your account on a computer and clicking on My Account. Your account ID will show up just below your name on that page.

I sent the following email to N26’s insurance partner, Allianz, at their email address for N26 customers (n26warranty.nl@allianz.com):

I’ve removed my personal info above, but you should obviously fill in the IBAN, BIC and N26 ID.

I didn’t hear anything back from Allianz (not even a confirmation email), but about 10 days later, I received a €200 deposit into my account from Allianz.

Why €200?

The N26 insurance policy states that travelers receive €100 per hour of delay after the first 4 hours, so because my flight was delayed 5 hours and 40 minutes, I received €100 x 2 hours of delay for a total of €200.

But it wasn’t over…

The Second Delay

The day of my flight, I received another email from Middle East Airlines saying my flight was delayed even more, this time a full 9 hours from my original departure time. 

So I sent Allianz another email explaining what had happened:

I attached the same original ticket and N26 payment receipt I’d attached before, plus a new screenshot of the email Middle East Airlines sent me explaining the longer delay. I also forwarded the email from Middle East Airlines to Allianz, just like I’d done the first time around.

What happened this time?

Allianz sent me the other €200 two weeks later, so I got the full €400 I was entitled to for my delay. Nice!

Fun Fact: The amount of your insurance claim is unrelated to the amount you paid for your ticket. My flight ticket only cost me €90, but I got a full €400 back for the delay.

What about getting flight delay compensation from the airline directly?

When I checked in for my flight at the airport in Beirut, I asked Middle East Airlines about compensation, given that my flight was 9 hours delayed. They weren’t helpful, and just told me I should reach out to their customer service team online. 

So I did that, but they weren’t helpful, either, telling me there was nothing they could do.

And because my flight was between two countries in the Middle East (Lebanon and Egypt) and not in a region like North America or the EU, many of the consumer protection agreements that govern those jurisdictions didn’t apply to my flight.

In short, I’m very glad I bought my ticket with N26.

In Summary

The travel & medical insurance that comes with N26 Black and N26 Metal is extremely impressive, especially given its low monthly fee. It offers high limits, makes the claim process as straightforward as possible, and covers you in a wide variety of scenarios, ranging from emergency hospital visits to delayed baggage to getting mugged.

The N26 insurance plan also fares well when compared to other insurance plans like World Nomads and the Revolut plan, which are either much more expensive, offer less extensive coverage, or both. The one insurance plan it doesn’t beat is SafetyWing’s, which is why we recommend combining the two to create a highly affordable, watertight insurance package.

Overall, we highly recommend N26, and can vouch for its insurance plan as one of the best on the market.