The company is completely dysfunctional. The product organization has been completely castrated by the CEO, who demands that all decisions be signed off by him. To make matters worse, he has surrounded himself with yes-men, who are happy to collect their paychecks while adding nothing of value to the organization, such as a CTO who has no technical background.
Decisions are made on whims, and are always chasing a quick win, just to keep the VC money flowing. It took how long and how many warnings from BaFin to finally build out a legitimate fraud prevention team? Why make a real commitment to building a bank if you can fake it until you make it instead.
Why did N26 enter both the UK and USA? Money. Why did they leave both markets? Because no one ever asked what would make those markets successful, so instead they bombed. Why should any one think a commitment to expanding into eastern Europe will be any different?
And to sum up how out of touch management is, early on during Covid, there was a company-wide meeting, where the founders were fielding many tough questions about the recent layoffs and their lack of work from home policy. The COO decided to cut the meeting short to announce that he was dropping his new techno album and you could contact him for a copy.
