I just created a new recurring transfer at IBKR, though I did chose saved sending institution details (Neon). For me the instruction received is still the Citibank London IBAN for Interactive Brokers LLC, Greenwich CT (USA).
Let’s see if I can increase my monthly inpayment by 50 CHF without going broke.
Side note: When entering recipient details, Neon don’t allow choosing the U.S. - though they do offer Serbia, Pakistan and the Syrian Arab Republic, among others.
Ok, it seems to be their new custodian (?) bank for their news customers.
For the moment it works perfectly and I don’t why but I feel more confident sending my money to a swiss bank (sometimes my brain is a bit irrational).
Yes, they do for me.
The funny part: a few years ago IB was not providing a CHXXXXX IBAN. Some colleague at work figured out they were nonetheless clearing on SIC (so swiss banks could clear directly and consider it as domestic) and reverse engineered the IBAN.
This became a known “trick” (tho you do need a leap of faith sending large amount of money to the non advertised IBAN 
).
A few months later I think people contacted IB support, they were confused for a while and then said this was a new account and they’ll use that IBAN going forward (it’s still unclear to me if it was really new or if they realized they should advertise this IBAN).
That was an amazing hacking/reverse engineering demonstration. (That person might be/have been on this forum, if they recognize themself, kudos again!)
Another “funny” part:
Isn’t there one Swiss bank (Migros Bank?) that nonetheless insists (and not wrongly, technically) it’s a cross-border transfer and charge accordingly?
Does the german bank BIC show up on Inquiry IID | SIX?
If so then the same trick likely works and the IBAN could be converted to CHXXX
I think it might have been the mythical hedgehog here:
That was a really impressive hack indeed
What do people think of going through (a 100% reliable) 3rd person (swiss resident). Would the chain UBS account in my name —free–> CH IBAN Revolut in 3rd persons name —free?–> LT Revolut in my name —free–> IB work? Or would it cause only more trouble? (For example would it affect taxes and or would it get blocked somewhere because it looks like suspicious money laundering or would there still be hidden fees somewhere?)
I’m really confused how I should send CHF to the German CHF account from my Liechtenstein CHF account.
Does SEPA work? I thought that only worked for EUR, but my bank allows me to pick CHF as a currency… Or will it somehow convert it internally (at some scammy high conversion rate?) ?
Or should I try the more expensive “Auslandsüberweisung” and let the receiving bank pay the fees? But the part with the BIC seems really archaic and a bit scary…
Yes, EUR only.
Side note: Contrary to Switzerland (and now the UK), Liechtenstein is a EEA member state. SEPA cross-border transfers to/from other EEA member states are therefore price-capped to the same fees as domestic SEPA transfers (that doesn’t mean though that your Liechtenstein bank has to offer them for free).
Probably not easily to be answered without knowing - or asking - your bank.
Most normal thing in the world. Even used to be one for SEPA transfers until just a couple of years ago. Bank transfers without any bank/sort/routing code are the exception. Especially if they’re cross-border (then again, SEPA has just largely incorporated these bank routing information into their IBAN format).
In practice it would likely fly under the radar for certain amounts.
In principle, the trusted 3rd person would be merely forwarding funds for you, thus not acting on his own account - which in case of any investigation is not going to be appreciated by compliance people.
In the end, I believe there’s likely no squeaky-clean way to send CHF “for free” to your IBCE account - unless you can use CHF details that get cleared through the Swiss interbank system (domestic IBAN, basically).
You’ll likely have to swallow it - or try what you can get away with.
As a Geneva frontalier I also encountered this recently when trying to open an IB account. I naively thought tax residents of France would be allocated an account with the Luxembourg (or at worst the Irish) entity post-Brexit, but apparently Hungary (IBCE) is the only option. I also noted that you cannot choose CHF as your base currency when opening the account (only options are EUR, USD and Hungarian, Czech and Polish currency). Several contacts with IB Support confirmed that there are no other options: IBCE account location and one of those 5 currencies as a base…take it or leave it.
As all our income is coming in in CHF, I really wanted a CHF base currency to avoid several FX hops, but even more importantly, I have reservations about our life savings being based in Hungary…so it’s caused me to stop the IB account opening altogether and question the right way forward for now…
The other concerns might be valid, but the base currency shouldn’t matter, what matters is being able to hold/trade FX.
(I have CHF as base currency but mostly interact with USD on IB)
So I’m curious now, can someone share the IBCE IBAN used for CHF?
Btw I noticed that captrader was listing a credit suisse IBAN, do you know if captrader customer are on IBCE or one of the other location?
Thank you. I had not realized I was using the Hungary based entity and didn’t properly think it over after the discovery. I am also not happy with being Hungary based. That is not the most stable country and thus a poor choice to trust your life’s assets with. I might also take my investing elsewhere (Degiro I guess) since I haven’t started yet.
I am with degiro.ch and degiro.fr (started in CH and then opened in FR as well as I’m thinking it may make life easier when it comes to tax returns). I only started investing last year, so this year will be my first time submitting a French tax return and needing to extract the required docs from Degiro…we’ll see.
But I was interested in IB as there are certains stocks and funds not available in Degiro that are available on IB…but for me the Hungary thing is more or less a dealbreaker…
Are you happy with Degiro? You have both? Should it not correspond to your current (tax) residency? What are the benefits of either? French one provides the correct documents for the french taxes? Also for the matters discussed in this thread how are they funded? Can I fund using CHF? Also can I transfer CH IBAN to CH IBAN?
I think currency conversion is much worse in Degiro right? That was why I initially preferred IB.
With the crash last year I thought it would be a good time to start investing a stash of cash that had been sitting in savings in the bank; I went to degiro.ch and degiro.fr and only degiro.ch was available in English…so that was what influenced my initial choice 
My strategy is mostly just buy-and-hold-ETFs, so I’ve only made relatively few trades, but around the end of the 2020 I started thinking about tax returns and decided it would be best to use degiro.fr moving forward. Degiro themselves didn’t seem to care that I have accounts on both platforms, as long as my tax residence is properly declared at both (which it is). Generally speaking, I’ve been happy with the usage of Degiro so far; I’m no expert in these things, but the platform is simple enough and I haven’t had too many issues…just that now I’d like to buy a non-ETF stock which is not available with Degiro (despite my asking their support to make it available, nothing exotic…freely-traded stock on the LSE). I know people who have bought this stock on IB, and since for many it’s usually a toss-up btw Degiro and IB, I started leaning towards a move to IB…until the Hungary thing came up.
The IB FX exchange is also very interesting to me as being frontaliers we are exchanging a few 1000s every month, and so was another lever for a move to IB, but I am not sure if it’s worth it to use IB “just” for that (again due to the Hungary factor).
Would the 10USD a month charge for having less than 100k at IB and the IBAN issues you have discovered (+ any resulting transfer fees) be compensated by better FX…?
Needs deeper investigating that I haven’t got around to yet!
Thanks for the information. Could you expand on the CHF issue or are you not using CHF to fund the account? I think avoiding a bank rate currency conversion when buying stocks is really important. Can you fund the degiro account using CHF (and then use something close to market rates to convert if necessary for stock purchases)?
As I think I may have hijacked the original topic of CHF to IB, will reply to you personally…
Do they even have one, if they aren’t supporting CHF deposits (as it seems, see my link provided above).
What’s wrong with Hungary?
The IB Central Europe entity may lack some functionality - but is there anything wrong about the country itself? I mean it’s not as if Luxembourg or Ireland with their outsized financial sectors seem less risky to me.
In political terms, it doesn’t seem less stable or democratic than the U.S. (where IB is headquartered) either, and there’s few people having qualms about investing more than half their life savings there.