• Ideas Payments

  • Send Sofort payment from own IBAN

I want to suggest to change how Sofort payments are handled at bunq. Instead of using an internal account to send Sofort bank payments to merchants, the sender‘s IBAN should be used in order to make the process more in-line with how it works at virtually every other bank.

At first I found it a nice idea that your own IBAN isn‘t revealed, but the downsides of this approach are significant. I lost money again and again to merchants that are unfamiliar with how bunq handles Sofort payments and don‘t handle refunds accordingly. One user here on Together even lost upwards of 2000 Euros, if I remember correctly. While this is of course the merchant‘s fault, I don‘t think the current approach makes sense in the real world.

Alternatively, a toggle on the payment screen could also solve this. You could activate a „private mode“ when paying at some sketchy web shop that would make it work like it works today and for everything else could use your own IBAN.

High-five this topic if you think that would be a good change 👍

Edit Jan 2022: Sofort now works differently and this suggestion is no longer relevant :)

    The problem also exists if you have to confirm the account ownership via SOFORT, e.g. at degiro.nl.

      Seems legit! Good idea

        Can you explain what exactly goes wrong? I currently have a refund pending through Sofort, now I am a little worried 😦

          @CarstenB#139888 At other banks, the user gives Klarna their login information and TAN, and they issue a regular bank payments on the user‘s behalf. For that reason the merchant sees the user‘s IBAN as originating account.

          Bunq has a special integration, which offers some nice features like not having to give Klarna your login info, just pay by scanning the QR code. However, they also make it so that the underlying bank payment originates at an internal bunq account, and not the user‘s own account. Some merchants that are ignorant of this will therefore send refunds only to bunq‘s internal account, and they will never reach the user.

          Refunds can work when merchants ask for your own IBAN and then send the refund payment there, but unfortunately not everyone is able or willing to do so. Hope this clears it up 😃

            @Jakob#139891 Ok, so the merchant will transfer the money to the internal account of bunq, and I have to talk to support to get my money from there?

              @CarstenB#139892 No, the internal account cannot receive payments and they will be rejected. Support is not helpful from my experience. The only way to get your money back is convincing the merchants to send it to your actual account.

              Still, I would advise you to tell Support about what happened so hopefully this can be changed in the future 👍

                @Jakob#139893 Thanks for telling me this. Would have expected that bunq or Klarna have a proper refund mechanism in place.

                  8 days later

                  I now have an update on this; I got my refund without any issues.

                  I guess this is because the merchant implemented SOFORT in a way where I have to enter my IBAN before even being redirected to the SOFORT website. I got the refund to the IBAN I entered there, not to the account I chose in the BUNQ app during payment.

                    @CarstenB#140703 That is indeed how I think merchants should do Sofort payments and so it worked well for you in this case ;-)

                      a month later

                      @Jakob#139873 I'm expecting a refund, also went to the internal IBAN.. hopefully bunq will look into this in the future.

                        3 months later

                        I want to bring this topic up once again because of a recent experience of mine. In February I was trying to buy something at a reputable online shop everyone here knows the name of. Out of convenience and because I apparently still didn't learn from my own mistakes I chose Sofort for the payment, which was a bit more than 1000 Euros. For some reason that they even couldn't figure out themselves, the booking went awry.

                        It took me until today, so nearly three full months, and countless phone calls and e-mails with their support staff, to finally get my money back because initially they would only send it to the originating IBAN. That's not bunq's fault really, they did everything according to protocol and I personally don't wrong them for that. That whole ordeal was after all exclusively between me and this company. But: 1) not every customer that goes through such an experience might see it the same way as me, and 2) if bunq would handle this to emulate how it works at every other bank, this probably wouldn't be a problem.

                        I guess I do have bad luck, and I guess I'm also a bit stupid for still trying to pay with Sofort in February, but it also shouldn't be this way. Peace.

                          Hey, I was in the same situation and of course I've lost my money. The problem is that sofort Überweisung is as they say only just the man in the middle and not holding your money ( I've got this many times via mail ) . The online shop is using a provider to communicate with sofort: in that case with the hidden/masked/virtual iban the issue appears that the payment that you made is not dedicated to your account, in case of problems, but the terms for sofort and the other providers which are using soforts APIs are clear. If an iban is not traceable to your name / account, then it's not yours and they can not confirm your payment.

                          The bunq Support tried back this time everything but without a positive result. I also hope they are thinking about changing that, loosing 💰 is not cool.

                            @equilibri0#164497 Bunq and Sofort are both financial service providers. Losing money cannot happen. So either bunqs implementation is wrong or the recipient is not transferring money back to the correct account, which is not your problem, really.

                            Has anyone read through the Sofort implementation guidelines and knows how this is supposed to work?

                              @Gerhard-Yellow-Frog#164517 Hey :) im not argumenting against that. Some online shop just using a provider to integrate there payment solutions on there websites. In my case that provider got from the shop the notification that something went wrong with the payment, transmitted that information to sofort back and now the MAGIC happens :D the check at sofort was not capable to transfer the money back to me because the sender iban which was transmitted from bunq to sofort was not my. It was this virtual pool iban which is not part of my account.

                                I briefly googled the API documentation for Sofort and it has a function for a refund; does that work with Bunq or is it broken? Has anyone heard an official word on that yet?

                                I have the same case and if they supply a counterparty with a wrong or misleading IBAN it's really their fault then.

                                  @Gerhard-Yellow-Frog#164521 They do provide some tools to prepare refunds to the merchant, but nowhere does it say that these tools always have the correct information already pre-filled, and they mention at two places that you can only do a refund if you have the "necessary" bank data ("Wenn Sie ein Konto in Deutschland sowie alle für eine Rückbuchung erforderlichen Bankdaten besitzen, können für Transaktionen im SEPA-Raum mit der Währung EURO Rückbuchungen ausgeführt werden.")

                                  My interpretation from that is that they give the merchants some bank data, but that this is not necessarily the "necessary" data that they say is needed for refunds. Because you can also see in the API documentation that IBAN and BIC for a refund can be manually changed by the merchant.

                                  But without knowing what kind of deal exactly bunq and Klarna have made here, it's hard to know who is at fault. It could (and should) definitely made a lot clearer to merchants that the sender IBAN might be random if that is how Klarna envisions their product. Or, if the sender IBAN should always be the actual IBAN of the sender's bank account, well then of course bunq's implementation is just straight up wrong. (But I cannot really imagine Klarna letting bunq just do this.)

                                  So yeah, whoever's fault it may be: bunq's, Klarna's or the respective merchant's. The current situation is bad for the consumer (and for no reason).

                                    @Jakob-Y#164541 Agreed. Thanks for your insights!

                                      3 months later

                                      @Jakob-Y#139873 I'm all for using our own IBAN for the Sofort payments. I noticed that the IBAN was not my personal IBAN when use Sofort to top up my account from another bank account.

                                      I recently cancelled two tickets from Deutsche Bahn which I had paid via Sofortüberweisung, and I got scared that I wouldn't receive my refund because of this IBAN issue. Especially after reading that you didn't get your refund from Deutsche Bahn in another thread. But it seems that someone, whether it might be bunq, Klarna or Deutsche Bahn, updated their services, because today I received my refund.
                                      Still, I think it would be nice if the personal IBAN would be used for these transfers.

                                        8 days later
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