• Ideas

  • Geolocation

I just visited a fintech conference in the UK, where I saw this neat solution for managing blocked countries. Basically it used the geolocation of the phone to determine where you are and automatically block all the other countries. So when I am in the Netherlands, transactions outside of the Netherlands are automatically blocked. But today, I am in the UK, and my phone knows this, so automatically, the UK is allowed, but all other countries are blocked.


This could be a safe and convenient solution to manage geoblocking.

    Hi Mark! 😄We always appreciate your suggestions and continuous focus on our improvement. We would then have to find the best way to make it as efficient as possible without draining your battery 🔋. What do you guys think about this?

      Revolut gebruikt ook geolocatie als extra beveiliging, maar dat geeft geregeld problemen omdat de betreffende betaalautomaat ergens anders geregistreerd staat.

        I think it the current solution is quite good. First card payment in a new country gets declined, and the app asks you if you want to allow that country.


        Location based allow/not allow comes with a lot of complications, like incorrect location reported, being on VPN so you can watch US Netflix, having your boyfriend using your second MasterCard at home while you are abroad etc.


        Better as it is now, to just block new countries, but provide an easy way to allow them on first decline.


        One thing though, that might be helpful. The app detects that you are in a new country, checking for this every hour or so, and as soon as you are in a country that is not on your allow-list, you get asked once if you want to allow that country.

          This could be implemented by using the “significant location change” APIs (in CoreLocation framwork for iOS and Criteria (low power) for Android); a very efficient way at determining whether the user has moved a considerable distance without draining the battery as a result of location polling.

            This may be the best way to implement such feature. Frequent location polling seems not reasonable to me, because maybe less than one percent of the location changes result in a change of the whitelisted countries.

              I’m in dubio about this. The current implementation works fine for me. I get an alert when trying to pay from a blocked country and can immediately change the setting. Automatic switching is more convenient, but what about border areas? Is low power hungry geolocation accurate enough to properly detect the current country?

                Currently bunq also takes the location of the phone for requests and some transactions. Maybe this can be integrated into the same polling of the location. 🙂 This way it can be updated when opening bunq.

                  This is an issue. I have the same experience.

                    Oh! Thanks for the tip, definitely something to keep in mind 👍

                      I even had an online transaction declined once because the merchant's location didn't match mine

                        What about restricting countries as an option/ choice. Especially when your data = your data!?!


                        What about VPN solutions/ restrictions...?


                        What if you don’t want any geo location ‘open’ ..? Or is this impossible to ‘(micro) manage’ technically ?

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