Which Swiss banks are you buying crypto with ?
I’ve heard of account freezes, if you buy crypto from UBS, CS, ZKB etc
Freezes? What freezes?
I know of Swissquote.
PostFinance. No, seriously. I don’t know about buying, but for more than a year now I have been regularly selling BTC on Kraken and withdrawing EUR or CHF to PostFinance. Did they question me about it - sure, they asked me to explain the transactions. But after that, surprisingly, they left me alone and have not frozen my account yet.
IBKR also didn’t seem to care that as source of funds I declared a significant % coming from crypto investments. Too bad one can’t send from Kraken to them directly.
Thanks Spock, very helpful!
When you say that they asked you to explain the transaction, did they write, email or telephone you to explain why ?
They sent a form with a list of questions by post, asking about the purpose of the transactions, how I acquired the crypto, why I am making transfers to IBKR, and so on. I filled it in and sent it back, I think even enclosing screenshots from my Kraken account and some IBKR statement, to prove that it is my own accounts that I am transferring from/to. Didn’t get further questions, it has been several months already.
Those freezes is not because you buy crypto there - but those banks get pushed back from the US counterpart to do so. So if you have crypto with one of the usual crypto exchanges and you sell, it goes frist in many cases via a US bank. And at least in the current situation, crypto is not accepted. So they might pressure the end bank here in Switzerland in one way or other.
If you want to play save, you need to buy crypto within a bank e.g. Swissquote or others. You can’t transfer those BTC for example out of this bank to your crypto wallet. You can only buy and sell within your bank.
Without being too specific, I presume that your referring to 6 figure or more in transactions for them to question it ?
Great to hear that PF are crypto friendly.
You can withdraw crypto from Swissquote, I have done it in the past.
That being said Swissquote is quite expensive at IIRC 1% fee.
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Just googled it - you are right!
Overall it was a 7 digit amount in CHF, that I converted from BTC to fiat investments in IBKR going through Kraken - PF - IBKR.
I remember reading somewhere that they cannot refuse to open accounts to Swiss residents. Maybe it is not about being crypto friendly, but given that there was nothing illegal about the origin of my crypto, they can’t just close accounts without a reason.
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In swissquote I guess you don’t control a wallet (owning the private keys), right?
Anyway my suggestion would be using Lykke. they are Swiss, the founder Richard Olsen is the same of Oanda…
I know they are soon launching also a simplified app soon.
There’s also SwissBorg, the wealth management app made in Lausanne, so local and more trustworthy 
)
It allows you to buy cryptos at the best live price and has good features for following your investment value over the long run.
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I also use swissborg, really simple to use, and really like it, but car when you make a deposit, as account seems to be in gb, so, as swissborg doesn’t tax you, your bank may. I’ve made a deposit of 200chf from Postfinance, and only 192 got through.
I’ll maybe make a deposit from revolut next time…
Yeah, I really hate the hidden rates of PostFinance, they don’t even know themselves how much money is going to be taken by the correspondent bank and since every USD transfer clears in the US you don’t have a choice.
As a friend of mine once said, “PostFinance is not a bank, you get what you pay for”
Postfinance is a bank. It has been for a while.
Bank or not, I think the criticism of “hidden rates” is unfairly singling them out. I am not aware of any bank in the world that would be willing or able to tell you the amount of correspondence bank charges for every SWIFT transfer.
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Crypto are there for kill banks and printed money. You shouldn’t use any bank for that.
Use a big exchange and transfer all to a private wallet.
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I know “it’s a bank”, I meant it’s not a bank originally, and it benefited from the existing Post network to reach customers and drive prices down.
I ranted about these hidden rates because in my experience they are usually 2 or 3 times higher than other banks (which I don’t like either), and when I talked to the person in charge of my account (a business account for my company, so I expect professionalism) he had no clue about what a correspondent bank was. Still it’s cheap, so if I don’t push the limits and just use a regular checking account it’s ok.
Hope that clarifies my point of view, and thanks for chipping in
I agree with you. Do you have any tips to load your account on the exchange?
with Revolut or something alike?
No sorry 
For the moment we can’t use only crypto and received crypto directly.
The world needs a little more time to accept crypto everywhere. (pay tax, receive his salary,…)
Many people don’t see their money lose value over time. Even on this website I want to reach 1’000’000CHF in X years but the real objective should be 20kg of gold or 100 BTC because in 10 years may be need 10’000’000CHF for buy 20kg of gold or 100 BTC
Seeing that Switzerland seems to have become a so-called “Cryptovalley”, i was looking around for some bank that offers purely custody, at a normal price. I found Bitcoin Suisse that offers custody for 0,4%-0.6%, according to their website. There seem to be other places like SEBA, but I didn’t want to go through the hassle of inquiring.
I try to figure out whether it is worth opening that kind of account, as opposed to for example buy an ETP such as WisdomTree’s relatively new product. 0,95% might seem steep, but as I want 100% legality and ease of use, I think it would be worth the extra cost.
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