In the summer of 2025, we received the news: Evo Banco was disappearing and merging with Bankinter.
When I opened my account with Evo Banco, it seemed like a different kind of bank. It was 100% online and free, and at the time, what stood out most was that you could withdraw money from any ATM in Europe without paying fees. For young people, it was a huge hit, because traveling was much easier without having to worry about extra charges.
At first, they also offered very good interest rates without requiring a deposit, something that today seems like science fiction in a checking account. Over time, those advantages were lost, but I kept the account because it served as a reference account for other banks. For example, at EBN you could only transfer money to your verified accounts and having Evo Banco as a bridge was very convenient.
Of course, not everything was perfect. Banks in Spain don’t work very well to begin with (although in Portugal, honestly, they’re even worse). And Evo Banco had its limitations: if you needed something more formal, such as a bank check, it was mission impossible. They had closed all their offices and there was only one left in Madrid, so you had to travel there to do anything in person. That made it useless if you wanted anything more than to move money online.
Then came the merger. All of us who were customers were told that we would automatically become Bankinter customers. In theory, the process was simple: with the same password we used at Evo Banco, we had to register on the Bankinter platform and generate new access codes.
In practice, it was a disaster. Diego did it quickly and without any problems, although his card took almost two months to arrive. I, on the other hand, spent weeks unable to access my account because the website wouldn’t accept my passwords. I kept getting errors all the time. I wrote like crazy on Instagram to the official accounts, but no one responded. And then suddenly, one day, I tried again, and it started working on its own, without anyone giving me a solution.
When I finally managed to log in, new problems arose. My debit card didn’t exist on the system. I had always had it at Evo Banco, and now it had simply disappeared. When I finally managed to speak to someone at Bankinter, they told me they didn’t know what had happened to that card, that they had no idea. The “solution” was to request a new one. At least there was no cost, but I had to wait for it to arrive at my home address before I could activate it and start using it normally.
The ownership certificate was another nightmare. Since my IBAN had changed with the merger, I needed to update my reference account at all my other banks. To do that, they asked me for the ownership certificate, but every time I tried to download it from the website, I got an error message. It turns out that to get it, I needed a coordinate card. We tried to request it online, but the system wouldn’t let me. So, I had no choice but to request the physical version, which was supposed to arrive in 4 or 5 business days. Of course, it didn’t arrive within that time frame.
The pathetic thing about it all: it’s 2025, and we still depend on a little card with numbers to validate transactions. Everything works in an archaic, slow way, with absurd bureaucracy that only wastes the customer’s time. Weeks went by and I couldn’t use my account. I wanted to transfer money from Bankinter to EBN and WiZink to create some deposits, and I couldn’t, because without the damn coordinate card, nothing was authorized.
By mid-August, after dealing with this mess since June, I had to write to Bankinter again on Instagram and tell them that the deadline had passed and nothing had arrived. Meanwhile, I had a blocked account, unable to move my money, with everything held up and immobilized, because their system wasn’t working and they weren’t able to give me an online alternative.
In addition to filing a complaint with the consumer office, I programmed an email that would be sent to the bank every day from me asking for a solution.
As you can imagine, those emails didn’t get a response either.
The user experience during the migration has been disastrous.
Personally, I feel that Evo Banco represented a stage of banking innovation in Spain but ended up being absorbed into the traditional dynamics of a large bank. For the little I used my account, it still serves me, but it is no longer special.
If this experience has taught me anything, it is that digital banking in Spain still has a long way to go. There is no point in boasting about modernity if, in the end, you depend on a little card with coordinates that doesn’t even arrive on time.
Meanwhile, I couldn’t move my money or make transfers, wasting time, patience, and opportunities. This experience taught me that, beyond marketing innovation, what really matters is the efficiency and reliability of the service, something that Bankinter still has pending.
On September 5, 2025, I finally received a formal response from Bankinter. As expected, they did not offer me any real solution. It was a generic letter apologizing and referring to “isolated incidents” and “security protocols,” but the reality was that I still had no card, no coordinate card, and, as a result, no way to access or use the money in my own account.
During the first week of September, I called the bank again. This time the coordinates card had already arrived (it had taken a month), but the debit card still hadn’t shown up. The person who assisted me told me that it had surely been lost in the mail —just like that— and that the only solution was to request a new one, which “would arrive in five days.” Yes, the same five days they had already promised me before.
We requested a second card, and, in the meantime, I kept sending the same daily email to Bankinter reminding them that the card still hadn’t arrived. The weeks went by, and finally, in mid-October, two envelopes appeared in the mailbox: the lost card and the second one I had requested.But neither of these two cards was the one that appeared in the app, so neither one worked.
Since a third card appeared in the app, I figured I would still have to wait for it to arrive in the mail. At the end of December 2025, I still didn’t have the blessed card, so I had to start making complaints again.
So I had spent six months with a very clear certainty.— that I had verified firsthand the mediocre and incompetent functioning of this entity.
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