Opening a Dutch bank account
You can survive here with a foreign card. You cannot really live here with one.
Rent, iDEAL payments, which is the online payment system everything uses, your phone contract, sports club fees, splitting dinner with a Tikkie. All of it wants a Dutch IBAN.
The order of operations
Most traditional banks want your BSN before they will open an account, so gemeente registration comes first. Some let you start the application and add the BSN within a grace period. App based banks are more relaxed about it. Either way, plan for one to two weeks without a Dutch account.
Where students actually bank
ING, ABN AMRO and Rabobank all offer student accounts with English apps. ABN AMRO has historically been the most used by internationals in Rotterdam, mostly because its onboarding copes well with non-Dutch documents. Any of the three is fine.
bunq is Dutch, app only, and will open an account before you have a BSN. That makes it a good bridge. You can receive money and pay by iDEAL in your first week, then decide later whether to keep it.
Revolut and Wise are useful for moving money from Azerbaijan cheaply, but a non-Dutch IBAN still gets rejected by some direct debit systems here. They complement a Dutch account rather than replacing it.
As things stand, a student account costs you nothing per month. The banks waive the account fee while you are studying. That can change, and it changes quietly, so glance at your statement once a term.
What to bring
Passport, BSN, proof of enrolment for the banks that ask, and your Dutch address. Non-EU applicants sometimes get asked for the residence permit. If yours is still being produced, the admission letter plus MVV usually does the job, though this varies by branch and by mood.
Money coming from Azerbaijan
Transfers from Azerbaijani banks can be slow, and the fees are real. Sending money home to Azerbaijan is the easy direction. bunq does it through Wise under the hood, which makes it cheap and fast, and you do it from the same app you already have. That is the route most of us use.
Money coming the other way, from Azerbaijan to your Dutch account, is the fiddlier one. We are still writing up what actually works, including the costs and any limits on the Azerbaijani side, and will update this section soon.
One small dignity preserving note. Dutch supermarket terminals refused credit cards for years. Most take them now, but not all. If the machine sulks at your Azerbaijani Visa, it is the machine, not you. A Dutch debit card or phone wallet ends the problem for good.