Things eventually worked out. It trully looks like they were overloaded.
Did two transfers, one a while back and the other one just end of last week. The second transfer was now finished together with the first one. So the situation trully seems to be that things ended up on a backlog pile for a bit more than a week. Too much work and probably some processes that are less automated than one could imagine…
2 Likes
Interesting.
To me it took literally 10 days (start of request to selling the units to transfer of the funds to arrival at FP). And the main time taken was between request and selling. The funds were transferred within 2 days of selling the units. Referring to UBS to FP
However in FP, investments are made only on Tuesdays, so if the money doesn’t arrive by Monday, it would remain uninvested for a week.
Aye I am not talking about 3A, just regular custody account. Transferring my 3A from SwissLife to Finpension took maybe two weeks.
Ahh okay. I didn’t capture that
so based on your experience which 2 Pilar account do you recommend …Finpension or VIAC?
3 posts were merged into an existing topic: 3rd pillar investment solution from VIAC [2024]
I just add this information here.
I thought that the exchange rate on finpension was near 0%.
So I asked if I can deposit usd, and Finpension said yes.
The result was unexpected because this usd deposit costed 1.5%.
The problem was that when I deposited to Finpension, UBS automatically converted my usd to chf.
So in theory Finpension hasn’t charged 1.5% but it was UBS which took 1.5% because I deposited usd to Finpension.
edit: Finpension is great but you must deposit chf.
How is it possible to deposit USD in Finpension when the account is CHF IBAN where transfer is made?
Did FP give you another account number?
1 Like
My bank (Raiffeisen) does, too, automatically.
I asked them whether we could wire EUR to my wife’s CH IBAN (French VAT that was returned to her) and they said they would accept most currencies and just convert to CHF at their daily FX rate (of course not the best rate).
2 Likes
I see. So most likely it depends how the transaction was executed and who is responsible for fx i.e. receiving bank vs. sending bank.
Do you know if FP rates are better or worse than 0.25% (using Alpian, Saxo & Degiro as reference) ?
Well, you can’t really use finpension for currency conversion, e.g. to get Euro. For trading, at Invest, they claim negligible FX fees (some bp).
I meant if I deposit USD there and they convert it for investments, do they apply negligible markups?
It’s not them who convert, but their bank, with a Swiss bank FX conversion markup. And that’s the point.
3 Likes
An IBAN is not necessarily tied to a single currency. E.g. the CH IBAN from a Swissquote account accepts transfers in different currencies without conversion. Foreign currency transfers often have an extra fee even within Switzerland (except EUR) but there is not necessarily an automatic currency conversion.
I assume your USD account was at UBS. If UBS converted USD to CHF, this means that you actually transferred CHF.
You could have transferred USD and then UBS as sender would not have converted your USD to CHF (but would likely have charged a fee for the transfer). However, I don’t know whether finpension’s IBAN accepts USD without conversion. So, it’s not clear whether this would have been better.
Or is finpension’s IBAN at UBS and you did a transfer in USD where UBS as recipient bank did the conversoin?
Okay . Got it .
I think in this case the Finpension Account is CHF-only, and everything that comes in gets converted - with a bank’s markup.
1 Like
On which bank statement do you see the conversion and the 1.5% fees? On the bank statement of the bank you transferred the money from or on a statement from finpension?
Or switch to a stock portfolio and buy the dip 
2 Likes
Not a big difference but both VIAC’s and Frankly.'s annual fees are 0.44% currently, to my understanding. I would double check these numbers (additionally, ChatGPT is likely to take its data from marketing material from the providers, while currency conversion fees are notoriously very seldom clearly stated without obfuscating aspects).
6 Likes