Current cheapest day-to-day banking/credit card combination

Check out BCV.

https://www.bcv.ch/de/Personal-Banking/Produkte/All-in-one-banking-packs

thanks! However, unless I’m mistaken, BCV doesn’t include free & unlimited withdrawals worldwide & no fees on Maestro Payments worldwide. Am I missing something?

Raiffeisen Member Plus is unbeatable if you and your family regularly visit museums in Switzerland, a lot of them are free. Depending on your usage, it can more than offset your annual fees
https://memberplus.raiffeisen.ch/de/museum

Edit: I also have Migros Cumulus credit card as we shop mostly in Migros, and Revolut.

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That’s something that convinced me to them. I’m planning to visit a lot of museums with my son on rainy days next year. It will be a good diversifier to the local library.

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What about the currency rate for the withdrawal ? At least revolut uses the interchange rate

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Even if you surpass the 200CHF free limit, the 2% fee on additional withdraws will be less than most banks will charge for FX. Postfinance has usually the best FX rates in Switzerland. Withdrawing 1000€ will charge you 1113.80 CHF. Revolut’s EUR rate is 1084.70 CHF today. 2% on top of that is 1106.40 CHF.

So even if you have to pay the 2% fee for withdrawing money with your Revolut card, their rates are that much better that you still get the best deal.

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According to their factsheet, they’re using the rate of the day of the transaction, so it looks similar to revolut
https://www.cler.ch/fr/-/media/files/bc/zak/zak-plus_factsheet_fr.pdf

Revolut gives you the “real” rate (when the market is open, e.g. not on weekends), the daily rate Cler refer too is usually the visa/mastercard rate (which is typically 0.5% away from FX rate for common currency pairs).

Edit: actually some swiss banks sometimes use the UBS rate instead, which is iirc worse than visa/mastercard, might be worth asking the bank directly which rate they refer too, the fact that it’s daily anyway hints that it is not the market rate.

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Even disregarding fees charged by ATM operators themselves…

It’s not ”free” til I have seen their currency exchange rates.

Is it that much? I think I remember it’s closer to (whichever) spot rate, at least for Mastercard transactions.

For instance, at “0% bank fee” their currency calculator indicates for today:
1 GBP = 1.277135 CHF
1 CHF = 0.786865 GBP

That would indicate a total spread of (slightly less than) 0.5% - and therefore a deviation of only half that from the mean, for a one-way currency conversion: approximately 0.25%. The question is though, what rates they’re actually using. I am not aware of a Swiss credit card even using Mastercard rates.

…which is a bit unfortunate that it’s just Maestro (though somewhat understandable, because their Mastercard is handled by a third party).

Virtually all online purchases as well as common travel expenses like flights or hotel prepayments can’t practically be paid with Maestro. Car rentals would at least take special care and discussion (you could ask to make a guarantee deposit with a proper credit card, and then pay the final bill with your Maestro). Also, bigger-ticket items or services might be excluded as well - will the standard daily 1000 CHF limit for Zak Maestro cards at third parties also apply in their plus plan?

If I computed correctly, USD/CHF for today is 0.4% with the calculator, I guess it depends on pairs (and I guess on how much volatility their model expects).
I had somehow remembered 0.5%, but yes in most cases might be between 0.2% and 0.5%. Anyway good enough for me as an alternative/backup to Revolut :slight_smile:

Unless you have the premium account you probably pay for it even if holding >7,5k. The tricky thing is that I think they group this in one year charge. Have a look in your transaction history on the 31st of December and see if you don’t have something like “trafic des paiements” or something like this. I actually discovered this today. Not huge, but still a bit of dogy move because it’s supposedly “free”

It’s a bit dodgy indeed! And you are right, I just got a debit for that :frowning: I will have to move to Neon earlier than I anticipated.

Was there I misunderstanding somewhere?
I was referring to my experiences with Swisscard (an Neon) - nothing I’d consider “dodgy” in any way so far.

There was some kind of mistake, I meant to quote thepoorswiss regarding MirgrosBank. For some reason i replied to him but I quoted you. It’s corrected now. Sorry for the noise

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I am sorry, I am citing this article again.
Cler / Zak is among the worst FX rate/fee-wise. That’s the hidden cost and where they make money

Doesn’t really matter when you use Revolut.

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Absolutely. I was just irritated by

and the guesses if it was 0.4 or 0.5% fee when it is actually 4.5%

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ZAK has also transfering limits. Max. 5k/day and 10k/week.

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It’s not really useful. You will still get a very bad currency exchange (like at all of the swiss banks). Also Maestro mostly only works within Europe. Better use Revolut out of country.

You can go over those limits, but you have to call support for each transaction.

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I just got a confirmation that no web version is planned for ZAK which is quite limiting for using this account as your main.
At the end, I don’t know the best combination. However, the best cards for FX seems to be Revolut.
I like Raffeisen with their museums and ski offers.

BCF offers a free account with a web interface and a free card for withdrawal at their ATMs (only in Fribourg canton). However, the Maestro card is 30.-

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