That’s unfortunate. Do you know when UBS Twint will stop working without a UBS account?
It was possible with Raiffeisen TWINT but they are completely removing integration of credit card around end of July and only allow paying with Raiffeisen account… what a shame… 
I have seen no other communication than that screenshot. So, no, I don’t know.
I tried adding a new method of payment to the UBS Twint app: the app asks you to authorize with the UBS e-banking Access app. So no way to add a credit card anymore.
Prepaid TWINT sucks, but having to switch banking apps does as well.
According to this comparison, the top five free banking packages with a dedicated Twint app, ranked by total fees for purchases abroad with a debit card, are:
- Bank WIR: 0% fees
(for comparison: neon 0.67%, Alpian 0.4-0.7%, both don’t have a dedicated Twint app) - Yuh and Swissquote: 0.98% fees
- ZKB: 1.6% fees
- Zak: 1.96% fees
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You can’t use Twint abroad. Or do I miss something in your reasoning?
I was trying to set up various native banks’ Twint apps on my new ungoogled smartphone and they all kept failing. I really didn’t want to contact all the supports and explain that no, I don’t want to have Google spying on me. Prepaid Twint app installed without issues. And I find it ok.
First I had to do an automated verification of data: scan an ID with a smartphone, do a selfie.
Then it took few days until “personal data were verified” or something like this. Then I got a reference number to transfer CHF by bank transfer to top up the Twint account. The first transfer took 2 days to appear in the app. But I haven’t used it yet 
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Interesting. I wonder what makes the Prepaid Twint app so different from al the other Twint apps.
I tried to cram too much info into one sentence. What I was trying to say is that I compared banking packages that have all of those features:
- free
- a card with zero or very low fees for purchases abroad
- a dedicated Twint app
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A bit more detail:
| FPF* | Web app | iPad app | Dedicated Twint app | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bank WIR | 0% |  |
|
|
| neon | 0.67% | |
||
| Alpian | 0.4-0.7% | |||
| Swissquote | 0.98% | |
|
|
| Yuh | 0.98% | |
||
| ZKB | 1.6% | |
|
|
| Zak | 1.96% | |
*foreign purchase fee, including hidden markups on the forex rate
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Thanks for this table! I assume the numbers for FPF are for payment with the debit cards of these banks, not FX account transfer or withdrawal of ATM abroad. Is that correct?
I’m actually surprised about the high number of ZKB and Zak.
Correct. Purchases abroad with the included card. Total fees are from the moneyland comparison I linked to above.
You are surprised that these two traditional banks have high fees? What’s more surprising to me is that the fees aren’t higher.
1 Like
Wir is a traditional bank, Zak could be considered a neo bank. ZKB has zero fees if you only use it domestically. I think that neobank = cheap and traditional bank = expensive is too simplistic.
ZKB also very much depends on the amount being paid, because the fee has a cap:
I even started using the ZKB debit for larger ‘foreign’ purchases, because from my testing, the FX mark-up was minimal and the fixed 1.5 CHF became way less relevant compared to the 0.35% of Wise for example
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Thank you. What about the exchange rate being used?
It’s been a while since I lasted did a test .. this was the view in July 2024
For this test, I bought 25 EUR Amazon vouchers with each card at the same time. As you can see, for 25 EUR ZKB is overly expensive due to the 1.25% markup … get’s much less material once you go higher. Cannot compete with the likes of WIR etc, but currently for me not worth to swap for that.
95% of my FX payments are in EUR and I simply transfer to IBKR, exchange to EUR and put on a free EUR account in Germany (DKB)
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FYI this is a flawed methodology as each card will settle the transaction at a different time and following a different strategy. I performed several similar experiments in the past, for instance while being on vacation and comparing the FX rates I’d get over multiple transactions in a short time.
- Revolut: as everyone knows, real-time spot rates except during weekends
- Wise: their own mid-market rate + fee
- MC and Visa: some kind of blended daily average + markup, typically settled on day+1
- Radicant (RIP): their own spot rates at a much later date, basically excluding the weekend and holidays.
I’d sometime see Radicant win or lose by a big margin simply thanks to the currency pair moving significantly over a full week. I could also manage to get unlucky with Revolut and have Wise and MasterCard beat the rates of every transaction on a single day.
Not sure how Alpian fares as I didn’t have time for such experiment yet. Swisscard’s Visa is also in the ~1% bucket from what I’ve seen so far, they clearly don’t use Visa reference rates (maybe it’s just Amex rates, as UBS got rid of Swisscard, now fully owned by Amex Switzerland).
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I am not denying that this is a shortcoming of the test, however, what other real option is there given that not all card providers are not publishing their rates.
I have repeated this round once per quarter in 2024 and with the ‘Amazon Gift Card’ way, I could ensure, that the transactions happen all within 5min of each other. Still does not get around the ‘settlement’ timing, agreed. However, across these, somewhat the same pattern appeared even if actual rate differences varied … as you say Revolut (unless you would need them on a weekend) and Wise were always was among the Top3.
Lately for simplification, I ended up using Wise for non-CHF and non-EUR transations, simply to avoid having to manage multiple providers.
I also got the UBS Twint message saying I’ll soon need a UBS account, which is a no go. I want to keep Neon as my main bank account for a little longer, but I’m hesitating between opening an additional Migros Bank account mostly for twint, or just going twint prepaid.
Would it be roughly the same process to send/receive money? How does the prepaid version work, is it like a dedicated bank account with an iban of its own and end of year reports, etc? And when receiving money, does it land on that account, or on an iban I provide (eg my neon account)?
To be fair I’m more and more interested in moving all to Migros (don’t travel abroad too much these days and when I do I could keep neon as backup), but don’t want to do it just for that if it’s overkill compared to twint prepaid.
Yes. Twint is based on a cell phone number, not a bank account. You can have several Twint accounts from different banks and/or prepaid and tie them all to your one cell phone number.
No IBAN. See here on how to charge your Twint prepaid account. Not sure what you mean by end of year report, but you also have a transaction history in Twint prepaid.
No, it lands in your Twint prepaid account and stays there until you use it or give explicit (one time) instruction to transfer it to a bank account.
May I ask why Migros?
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Thanks! By sending/receiving money I meant to/from the main bank account. I understand that the twint-specific part works the same for all apps / banks.
And Migros, well it’s free, my wife’s main account is there, I don’t care about abroad payment fees as I can use neon for that, and even though I only withdraw cash every other full moon, at least I know I have a way to do it for free without struggling too much to find the right spot/atm.
In the past years I’ve tried Zak (hated it), Radicant (didn’t really try it much and it went down shortly after) and Neon (sticked with it, but still frustrated by the lack of twint app and new atm fees, not to mention too much downtime). I’m not too motivated to bank hop every year because one just became slightly more interesting than last year’s previous best choice. In this regard I see Migros as relatively stable in terms of features and conditions. But I’m open to suggestions.