We have now also released the page regarding the new tax reporting: https://finpension.ch/en/reporting-for-the-lump-sum-tax-credit-for-withholding-taxes-on-us-dividends/
First of all . Thanks for your continuous effort to improve financial offerings for Swiss customers. I hope your Personal wealth business grows as well as your 3a did
One question I have. This is just for my own understanding. What exactly is “custody fees” ? For example some banks:brokerage charge 0.3%, some more and some do not charge anything.
Does custody fees comes with some sort of protection for the investors or it’s just a cost that is charged by custodian banks? I am not able to understand why there is so much difference in these cost. You separated Custody fees from management fees, so it seems even you don’t benefit from that.
To me it seems like added cost for no benefit. But would love to know if you see it differently.
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Custody is done by finpension. Thanks to our licence as an account-holding securities firm, we are not dependent on a custodian bank.
So assuming the portfolio has two thirds US stocks, the advantage would be 0.2% for the entire portfolio. Meaning the 0.39% yearly fees would turn into 0.19%.
Is that correct?
Maybe it’s without transaction costs at finpension vs with transaction costs at IBKR which are lower than at SQ?
I do not see transaction costs in the table…
Yeah I ignored those as those are one time costs.
But it would be 9 CHf on SQ plus stamp duty.
IB is almost negligible
I don’t know if stamp duty is part of FP offer
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Depends on how much US % you have in the portfolio and the dividend yield of the US
Say you have 60% US with 1.5% div yield x 15% = 0.135% less cost.
Now if they enable the other countries also, that‘s on average the ~ 2.1% (current VT yield) = 0.315%
I would imagine most people have at least one transaction per month or per quarter, especially if they use regional ETFs to reduce TER (and thus, likely invest in multiple ETFs). With exchange fees, a SQ ETF transaction is roughly CHF 11 + stamp duty. Whether that’s significant or not depends on how much you invest each month and how long you hold the investment.
Many people here have high salaries and invest a relatively large amount of money each month. I would expect the average savings rate for the target market of finpension invest to be lower.
Without a huge savings rate, monthly investments can get fairly expensive at SQ. If you invest CHF 500 a month, you might pay on average 0.2% p.a. just for transaction fees over a 20 year time span. You could optimize that by investing quarterly but that would make a balanced split into regional ETFs even less practical (and you would lose 1 month of investment return on average), so you would likely rather use a single world ETF, which would have a higher TER. Altogether finpension might no longer be more expensive and it would likely be more convenient.
I.e., even if finpension invest might not be the optimal option for many people here, it might still be a very good option for a large number of people.
(That said, neon or Yuh would likely be the better comparison for that target market).
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I agree totally.
For systematic investment planning where someone invests regularly smaller amounts , SQ transaction costs can add up. This is why I think SQ need to reduce their transaction fees to come close to IB and Saxo.
However - I think when it comes to transactions, there are four costs
- Forex
- commissions
- exchange related fees
- stamp duties
I am not sure why FP will not need to pay stamp duties. 0.39% includes only custody and management fees. So I am assuming Forex and commissions are included in this fees. But what about Stamp duties & exchange fees ?
I think if I didn’t know about all the math I always talk about, I would simply invest via FP invest 
but knowing the actual details, I tend to optimize between IB and SQ. IB for smaller transactions and SQ for larger transactions.
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Isn’t IB cheaper for larger transactions?
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“Stock exchange taxes and federal stamp duty are charged to customers.” [source], meaning that they bill the customer separately for that.
Let me clarify. IB is best for every transaction. But since I use both, I try to use SQ for larger transactions only.
That explains…
While we’re still waiting for the launch, perhaps we could start a discussion about the “private markets” part.
So it looks like they are not using the known private equity ETFs, but the institutional-class variants of the funds “The Partners Fund” and “Schroder GAIA II Global Private Equity”. Those can only be bought/sold every three months and have a TER of around 1.5%.
What is everyone’s opinion on this offer? High risk, high reward? Con?
I tend to agree with this. Also the returns (IRR) that PE likes to mention that are often >10% are just the returns on invested cash, there will always be a portion which is not invested. Furthermore PE is having problems unloading assets, they then just transfer it to a continuation fund (probably advertise it as a great investment, maybe one of the funds offered here, offloaded to an innocent retail investor?). Higher interest rates is also not ideal for their financing. I’m also not so keen on the ethics some of these PE companies have (particularly large US PE), they have some very questionable investments like hospitals, ER and nursing homes where I have heard some horrible stories.
The only benefit I see from PE is further diversification and that companies are choosing to stay private instead of doing an IPO, something which was less frequent 20-30 years ago.
I am invested indirectly in PE through holding some shares of a European PE, as I think their investments are selective and they have a decent track record.
There was a good article from the Financial Times on PE (because norwegian sovereign wealth fund wanted to invest, but ultimately government said no due to lack of benefit and high costs), unfortunately behind paywall, although you can sign up to the Alphaville column for free and read it.
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Thank you. It’s weird, when I open the link to the article through this tweet, I can read the article wihout subscribing 
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Missing the “not yet” button 
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Yes, it’s live now.
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Imprecise translation TBH. No, I no longer have to work for my entire life. I could stop 5-10 years before retirement age.
“so that you could stop working today” or “so that you don’t have to work anymore for the rest of your life” would be better.
But I’m nitpicking 
Great to see it’s live 