Dutch challenger bank Bunq told CNBC that it plans to grow its global headcount by 70% this year to over 700 employees, even as other financial technology startups have decided to cut jobs.
Bunq, which operates in markets across the European Union, is looking to expand into new regions including the U.K. and the United States, taking on the fintechs already in those countries, including the likes of Britain’s Monzo and Revolut, and American neobank Chime.
Bunq said it needs corresponding talent in those regions to support its global expansion ambitions. To that end, the firm said it plans to see out the year with 735 employees globally — up 72% from its 427 members of staff at the start of 2024.
“Bunq focusses on digital nomads who tend to roam the world,” Ali Niknam, Bunq’s CEO and co-founder, told CNBC via emailed comments.
So-called “digital nomads” are defined as people who travel freely while working remotely, using technology and the internet to work abroad from hotels, cafes, libraries, co-working spaces, or temporary housing.
“We’d love to be able to service our users wherever they go — given the regulatory environment we’re in, this results in us having to have a lot of extra people to make this happen,” Niknam added.
Bunq is currently in the process of applying for banking licenses in both the U.S. and U.K. Last year, the firm submitted an application for a federal banking license. And in the U.K., Bunq is awaiting a decision from financial regulators on an application to become a licensed e-money institution, or EMI.
The digital bank said it was actively looking to hire across sales and business development, product marketing, PR, affiliate marketing, and market analysis, as well as user support, development, and quality assurance.
Many of these positions will be part of a “tailored digital nomad” program that allows staff to work from anywhere in the world, Bunq said.
However, the firm stressed it’s not closing down office space and that many new hires would work in its offices, including in Amsterdam, Sofia, Istanbul, Munich, Paris, Dublin, Madrid, London, and New York City.
A contrast from jobs cuts at other fintechs
Over the past two years, one of the biggest stories in both the fintech and broader technology industry has been companies slashing jobs to cut back on the massive spending implemented during in the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021.
The operating environment for fintech firms has gotten tougher, meanwhile, with inflation knocking consumer confidence and higher interest rates making it harder for startups to raise money.
Meanwhile, some fintechs are looking to artificial intelligence to take on a growing number of roles.
Swedish buy now, pay later firm Klarna, for instance, said last month that it was able to reduce its workforce from 5,000 to 3,800 over the past year from attrition alone. It added that it is looking to further cut employee numbers down to 2,000 through the use of AI in marketing and customer service.
“Our proven scale efficiencies have been enhanced by our investment in AI, which has driven down operating expenses and improved gross profits,” the company said in first-half earnings.
Klarna said that its average revenue per employee had risen 73% year-over-year, thanks in no small part to the internal application of AI.
Bunq’s Niknam said he doesn’t see AI as a way to help firms reduce headcount, however.
“We’ve been deploying AI systems and solutions years before they became mainstream, [but] in our experience AI empowers our employees to be able to do better by our users, more effectively and efficiently,” he told CNBC.
Bunq earlier this year reported its first full year of profitability, generating 53.1 million euros ($58.51 million) in net profit in 2023. The business was last valued privately by investors at 1.65 billion euros.
The Exchange Square Complex, which houses the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, on Feb. 26, 2025.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
BEIJING — Chinese companies are jumping at a window of opportunity to go public in Hong Kong as global investors start to return to the region, following the news of DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence breakthrough in late January.
It’s a level of excitement that has not been felt for more than three years, despite the overhang of U.S. trade tensions. Initial public offerings are a lucrative way for early investors in startups to exit and reap a return.
“Everyone is working so perfectly together. IPO candidates, the investor and the regulators,” said George Chan, global IPO leader at EY. “All these three parties are working so perfectly at this moment to actually cultivate a healthy Hong Kong IPO market.”
“The U.S. long-term fund has returned. It shows investors are getting more confident [about] China,” he said, adding that post-IPO performance has also been encouraging.
News of China-based DeepSeek’s claims to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT in reasoning capabilities at a lower cost — despite U.S. restrictions on Chinese access to advanced chips for training AI models — hit global tech stocks in late January, while spurring a rally in China. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index surged to three-year highs.
Six initial public offerings in Hong Kong raised more than 1 billion Hong Kong dollars ($130 million) in the first quarter — a jump from just one listing of that size in the year-ago period — according to KPMG.
In all, the consultancy said, Hong Kong saw 15 IPOs in all of the first quarter which raised 17.7 billion HKD — the best start to a year since 2021.
There’s still a long way to go before recovering to that level. Hong Kong saw 32 IPOs in the first quarter of 2021 that raised a whopping 132.7 billion HKD, according to KPMG.
The Hong Kong stock exchange has adjusted its listing rules in the interim, including ones that support companies already listed in mainland China to offer shares in Hong Kong.
In addition to CATL, other companies listed in mainland China — Hengrui Pharmaceuticals, Mabwell, Haitian Flavoring and Food, Fortior Tech and Sanhua Intelligent Controls — are “actively seeking Hong Kong listings,” said Tiger Brokers, an underwriter of many Chinese companies’ IPOs in the U.S. and Hong Kong.
“Chinese regulators are encouraging companies to list in Hong Kong to broaden financing channels and support the outbound merger and acquisition needs of Chinese enterprises,” the firm said.
Still not out of the woods
Back in the summer of 2021, the fallout over Chinese ride-hailing company Didi’s IPO in the U.S. prompted both countries’ regulators to scrutinize what was then a wave of Chinese companies listing in New York.
The major issues have since been resolved and Beijing has clarified rules for Chinese companies wanting to list outside the mainland. But the Trump administration indicated in its “America First Investment Policy” that it could increase scrutiny on U.S. capital flowing to China, on top of heightened tariffs.
The U.S. and China have yet to indicate when their two leaders might meet in an attempt to forge a deal. A surge of interest in AI and tech are also not yet enough to speed up a recovery in China’s economy.
“At this point in time, all we can see is the good indicators,” EY’s Chan said. But “there could be one single incident happening which could pretty much reverse the trend.”
“Things tend to have a pattern,” he said. “If things can keep on for three months, four months, it will likely continue for the rest of the year.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent speaks to reporters outside the West Wing after doing a television interview on the North Lawn of the White House on March 13, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Andrew Harnik | Getty Images
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday the sell-off in the stock market is due more to a sharp pullback in the biggest technology stocks instead of the protectionist policies coming from the Trump administration.
“I’m trying to be Secretary of Treasury, not a market commentator. What I would point out is that especially the Nasdaq peaked on DeepSeek day so that’s a Mag 7 problem, not a MAGA problem,” Bessent said on Bloomberg TV Wednesday evening.
Bessent was referring to Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, whose new language models sparked a rout in U.S. technology stocks in late January. The emergence of DeepSeek’s highly competitive and potentially much cheaper models stoked doubts about the billions that the big U.S. tech companies are spending on AI.
The so-called Magnificent 7 stocks — Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia — started selling off drastically, pulling the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite into correction territory. The tech-heavy benchmark is down about 13% from its record high reached on December 16.
However, the secretary downplayed the impact from President Donald Trump’s steep tariffs, which caught many investors off guard and fueled fears of a re-acceleration in inflation, slower economic growth and even a recession. Many investors have blamed the tariff rollout for driving the S&P 500 briefly into correction territory from its record reached in late February. Wall Street defines a correction as a drop of 10% from a recent high.
S&P 500, YTD
Trump signed an aggressive “reciprocal tariff” policy at the White House Wednesday evening, slapping duties of at least 10% and even higher for some countries. The actions sparked a huge sell-off in the stock market overnight, with the S&P 500 futures declining nearly 4% and the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average shedding 1,100 points. The losses will likely but the S&P 500 back into correction territory in Thursday’s session.
“It’s going to be fine if we put the best economic conditions in place,” Bessent said in a separate interview on Fox Wednesday evening. “If you go back and look, the stock market actually peaked on the [DeepSeek] Chinese AI announcement. So a lot of what we have seen has been just an idiosyncratic tech sell-off.”
A Newsmax booth broadcasts as attendees try out the guns on display at the National Rifle Association (NRA) annual convention in Houston, Texas, U.S. May 29, 2022.
Callaghan O’hare | Reuters
Shares of conservative news channel Newsmax plunged more than 70% on Wednesday as its meteoric rise as a new public company proved to be short-lived.
The stock tumbled a whopping 72% in afternoon trading, following a 2,230% surge in Newsmax’s first two days of trading after debuting on the New York Stock Exchange. At one point, the rally gave the company a market capitalization of nearly $30 billion — surpassing the market cap of legacy media companies like Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox Corp.
Newsmax was listed on the NYSE via a so-called Regulation A offering, instead of a traditional IPO. Such an offering allows small companies to raise capital without undergoing the full SEC registration process. The primary focus is to sell to retail investors, in this case It was sold to approximately 30,000 retail investors.
The public offering indeed garnered the attention from retail traders, some of whom touted the stock as the “New GME” in online chatrooms. GME refers to the meme stock GameStop, which made Wall Street history in 2021 by its speculative trading boom.
Newsmax has a small “float,” or shares available for trading. Less than 6% of Newsmax shares, or 7.5 million shares out of a total of 128 million fully diluted shares, are available for public trading.
The conservative TV news outlet has seen its ratings rise with the election of President Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans — although it still falls behind the dominant Fox News. Overall, Newsmax ranks in the top 20 among cable network average viewership in both prime time and daytime, Nielsen said.