John This is complicated.
The products are intentionally designed differently. And with different labels, different regulatory and legal differences occur.
Some examples: merchants are allowed to pick between debit and credit for acceptance, they pay different merchant fees. Cards must be labeled accordingly.
The technical configuration of the card itself is different.
And then the internal calculations for interest differ. While the Travel Card appears like a debit card, I believe internally transactions are settled at the end of the month for interest (in cases where applicable). It seems to me that Bunq had to do that to be able to get the „credit“ label, because there are rules how cards have to be labeled and they wanted „credit“ here to improve acceptance.
I can only remember one card in Europe that combined Mastercard (credit) and Maestro (debit). And a card product manager who was looking into this and tested this bank card told me that he never had more problems with any other card. It was unreliable, caused problems on vacation due to its technical configuration and endless debates with merchants if it’s debit or credit or whatever.
So what sounds like a clever idea seems to be a UX nightmare.
