Nour Makes complete sense to me. Of course bunq supports Apple Pay in many other countries. But for example here in Germany Apple also managed to get many other banks on board for their launch, that are (at least at the moment) big players with a lot of customers.
For the Netherlands, it's of course hard to say exactly in which discussions Apple was with all the banks, but judging from the very late launch, it seems like all the banks except bunq were probably a bit reluctant in general to the contract terms.
So why didn't Apple go with bunq then, but offered the exclusivity deal to ING in order to entice them joining forces, is the question. And that's where I think @Wessel might be right: Apple wants as many people as possible to use Apple Pay in the Netherlands and the experience should be stellar without any hiccups. While I personally have a lot of trust in the bunq team, managing the potential influx of that many customers (if they had been the only Dutch bank to support Apple Pay), is a challenge from a technical, but also from a support perspective. People and the media would blame any kind of bad experiences on bunq AND on Apple. While with ING, even if there were any problems, people would mostly blame them on ING alone.
In the end, I think this is just one of the reasons why Apple favors big companies as partners over small companies, at least when these partnerships are very customer-facing. There's a reason why the Apple Cash card is just "Apple Cash", and Green Dot Bank is only mentioned in some fine print, while for the Apple Card, the Goldman Sachs logo is very easy to spot.
