You could also skip the PF EUR step and directly make a SEPA transfer from IB to Revolut in EUR using your personal Revolut EUR IBAN number.
I have transferred earlier this month 500 EUR and it was credited on my Revolut account in 1 or 2 business days.
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You are right, but with IB you only have 1 free transfer/month -> either
- you transfer a small amount and then - if you need to transfer again in the month - you have to pay or
- you transfer a bigger amount (but you have to be confident in Revolut, which is quite young company
If you transfer to PF you can then manage the transfer(s) to Revolut with more flexibility.
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You are right. Thanks weirded.
I will use your solution if I need to keep larger amount of EUR ready to be used on Revolut.
I thought IB had unlimited withdrawal for SEPA transfers (I was wrong).
It costs 1 (USD ?) from the second monthly withdrawal as per the other fees page (section Cash Movements).
So in total:
cost is = Free local SIX CHF wire + Forex CHF<-> USD exchange rate + 2 USD forex commission + 0 to 1 USD for every SEPA transfer
On top of this neither IB or PF EUR pay interest on EUR balance and I trust more PF to keep my cash :-).
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I’m now using Lykke to exchange chf to eur, the bid/ask spread is small
https://www.lykke.com/exchange
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I second Mbaluda.
I have a DKB Debit Card and Credit Card. I use Transferwise to send CHF direct to my DKB account, which then arrive as EUR. The CHF:EUR exchange spread is about 0.5%. It don’t get much better than that.
It’s an additional bank account, yes, but I can also use the Debit Card “free” all over Europe for paying at shops, without a Swiss Debit or Credit Card surcharge .
I also have a Migros Bank EUR account and card, that’s more for getting a bit of euro cash (in CH).
Their spread looks really low. Where’s the catch? How did they manage to get so cheap? I see they are heavy on the bitcoin/blockchain thing.
So do you second mbaluda in recommending Lykke, or do you recommend Transferwise? Because I don’t understand. Transferwise is not really an interesting option anymore. A SWIFT transfer to Revolut will usually be cheaper than Transferwise fee. If you want to get really cheap, use your broker. Now this Lykke thing looks interesting. Almost broker-level spread.
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In Lykke you can also transfer eur/gbp/usd with credit card which is quite cool I think
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Sorry Bojack, my reply was ambiguous cos I was seconding mbaluda’s post from 8days ago, but it also puts the reply down here at the end, so that it looks like I seconding his post from 2h ago. I don’t know Lykke, except Lykke Li (“I I follow”). If Transferwise is not interesting any more, I’ll look into Revolut next time. Thanks for the tip, I I follow. 
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Actually this DKB seems to be better than Revolut if you stay in the eurozone. Anyone compared them?
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If you are not “active customer” (at least 700 Eur/month transfer) you pay 1.75% commission on withdrawals outside EU (not bad) AND 1.75 commission on payments outside EU (this is imho bad, compared to alternatives such as N26, which allows free payments everywhere) -> https://www.dkb.de/privatkunden/dkb_cash/kontopaket/
Of course it’s a different matter if you are not interested in the “outside EU business” (which I need).
I think I’ll give N26 a try…
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N26 is not supported in Switzerland apparently. I thought dkb was nice because they give you 0.2% interest on top of the offer. N26 doesn’t and looks more like Revolut then. The nice thing is that they offer an insurance if you pay 5 eur per month. If they will accept swiss accounts then might be a good alternative of a Cembra Cumulus Mastercard if you use it more than once or twice per year.
Cumulus mastercard has 1.5% fee + shitty exchange, so you need to spend more than 10000chf to justify it maybe. I don’t know their markup so I can’t compare.
Addon: N26 uses Transferwise to exchange/transfer. I suppose revolut is then the best. If they only offered insurance for flights…
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You are right ma0, N26 is not supported in CH yet, but: they only need a physical address to ship the card.
I opened an account 5 minutes ago using my mum’s address in Italy; to identify you can use your identity card/passport (I’ve used my CH identity card without problems). I should receive the card in about 10 days.
Transfers in EUR can go directly through SEPA (your account has a german IBAN, DE XX 10011001 26XXXXXXXX). Transferwise can be used if you need to transfer to your account a different currency.
It should be similar to Revolut but according to some posts I’ve found, the Mastercard exchange rate used by N26 appears to be slightly better than the Revolut interbank exchange rate (small differences, I guess).
With Revolut you should get a real time rate (except on weekends, where they apply a markup on the spot rate which varies between 0.5% and 1.5% depending on the currency -> https://www.revolut.com/it/faq?lang=en#what-exchange-rate-will-i-get).
With N26 the effective applied MasterCard rate (with no markup) should be determined at settlement time instead of transaction time (usually 1-2 days later) -> https://support.n26.com/read/000001268?locale=en
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How come Mastercard has a better rate than interbank?
Also they have a CC free for now. It’s not clear what they mean with the sentence they use. It might cost later.
For the withdrawal outside EU, they ask 1.7%, which is probably more than the markup Postfinance has (with the plus account of course).
Funny that the non free Revolut offer health insurance and the non free N26 offer travel insurance…
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Problem is, the PF card with its EUFISERV network is quite “unusable” outside Europe (based on my experience, at least…). With N26 I’ll have at least a second option… 
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Interesting. I used it all around asia and never had a problem. I think I had to look for the right ATM only in Japan. I do not use cards to buy stuff though. I get money first.
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can somebody tell me how i can upload an xls file with my analysis of various EUR to CHF transactions? I can only see it is possible to upload an image.
Put it on Google Drive and share via Google Sheets.
I have been trying to buy Euros or make Euro purchases a few different ways paying in CHF although am not currently a IB or Revolut user yet. For the accounts/cards i currently have analysed, a CHF to EUR transfer via TransferWise seems to be cheapest at 0.5% premium to the ‘close’ exchange rate on xe.com for any particular day (maybe i’m referencing the wrong rate?). Thoughts?
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Q9-g_NVZb-Kaf0ONSXKNB-PZbhXGzPMRt-hPvicg-I0/edit#gid=198088213
Shameless ref-link also here, since even more in topic.
Now if you use lykke to convert CHF to EUR at really great rates you could use their upcoming card to spend them directly from there and save you any further step/transfer/bank account: https://card.lykke.com/tQe4uA24
The added value is also that you could directly spend cryptocurrencies with it!
Drawback is that if you would like to withdraw there’s a 2-2.5 fee and even more 3% if you use it outside of EUR (but you could probably issue another one in USD as well?)