Thanks, I am in contact with the customer service, but they are just super slow. The last message says that they will “update me at the earliest”. I just wanted to hear from the forum if someone did this already and how long did it take.
On May 15, I requested a refund for the fees that were deducted during the withdrawal attempt to Wise. I argued that the failure was not my fault, because the system didn’t let me enter any reference information.
On May 26, a representative sent a message that they were looking into it, and yesterday, May 30, Saxo refunded the complete USD 75, no further questions asked. 
Also, complete opposite experience when I withdrew the money that bounced from Wise, this time to UBS: I initiated the withdrawal during my lunch break, and the money appeared 10 minutes (!) later in my UBS account.
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Recent interview (in German) with Saxo Switzerland’s COO.
Some takeaways
- Safra Sarasin is holding 70% of shares after a strategic fusion
- Saxo platform is free (trading, depot, account)
- free electronic tax report
- first Swiss neo bank offering free ETF Sparplan
- Needs to double Swiss customers
- More innovations in the pipeline
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As it looks, Saxo seems to become interesting. Did anyone try to use a referral code from a user outside of Switzerland for opening an account in Switzerland? Would that work?
Don’t know, but why would you want to do that? There are plenty of ch referral codes on the Internet.
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In this case, because my wife still has an old EU-Saxo account 
And if not possible, maybe someone would prefer me not to get a code from a stranger on the internet.
[Edit] Ah, I see there is one on the MP Blog here. In that case, I might use that one, happy to support this site.
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I recently opened a trading account with Saxo, funded it and bought some shares etc.
I like the platform and they seem to be significantly cheaper than SQ.
Also no custody fees and they don’t have the “stair step” commission structure that SQ does. (i.e with SQ you pay a flat rate commission between bands so a purchase of CHF 2,001 and CHF 9,999 pay the same commission which is crazy)
SQ will need to improve their offering.
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According to their share price, they are doing just fine for the moment 
But I agree that one day they will have to think about reducing their prices.
Just like UBS, Raiffeisen etc…
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I also opened an account with them and funded with cash from Swissquote. I wonder if SQ gets the message…
Is someone here a VIP and cares to add an ex-US ETF (distributing)?
EDIT: workaround is buying it through IB and transfering it to Saxo. But it‘s not a sustainable solution, imo.
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Can someone with a Saxo Bank account, please, check if they can trade on the NZ stock exchange? In particular, I’m interested in the SmartShares “FNZ” ETF (link).
I could not find this ETF on Saxo. It is not possible to trade on NZX.
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I hold VTI on IBKR & Schwab and want to diversify broker and US risk by opening Saxo. A couple of questions:
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Has anyone moved $300k of VTI from IBKR to Saxo, kept the account inactive, sent quarterly dividends back to IBKR, and then moved the stocks back to IBKR after a few years? What were the actual costs (transfer fees, custody, dividends, etc.)?
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If I move $3k per quarter (dividends) from Saxo to IBKR to buy more stocks (avoiding Saxo trading fees), are there any intermediary or hidden fees? Any real-world experience would be great.
Thanks!
I’d bet nobody has as the fees for Saxo have only been really competitive for the past half year or so since they dropped custody fees, though I could be wrong.
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Have you done the math on what is cost difference between investing 3K at Saxo vs IBKR on quarterly basis? It seems to me you are trying to save 5-10 CHF per quarter. Not sure if it’s worth it.
But sure - you can send USD from Saxo to IBKR but I don’t think that would be free. So you need to pay for international bank transfer fees.
Transfer fees of shares from Saxo to IBKR should be about 50 CHF per position.
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I think it might be easier to just hold accumulating funds in Saxo in this case.
US-based ETFs are never accumulating I think, but you can either:
- Hold accumulating IE-based US-stock ETFs (but you will waste % of dividends due to withholding)
- If you also have non-US-stock part of your portfolio then keep that in an accumulating fund in Saxo, e.g. EXUS
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Opened a new Saxo relationship some weeks ago and am not convinced. Reason: slow and overzealous Compliance dept, customer experience between app and messaging not aligned.
Initially it all went pretty fast. Proof of identity and proof of address were straightforward. For source of wealth, I ticked 1. Employment, 2. Profit from investment, 3. Gift. Next they wanted evidence for all 3.
- Employment was easy to prove
- For investment return I submitted a portfolio report from Swissquote
- The gift happened 15 years ago and was demonstrated showing wealth graph.
It took them 10 days to ponder my answers and come back with a new request to give them more info about crypto held with the other bank. How did I obtain it and with what money? I told them this should not concern them as I will not be doing crypto with them and argued that the CHF funds transferred to them came from a FINMA regulated bank.
2 more weeks passed before they communicated acceptance of my answers. Almost 4 weeks for an onboarding felt too long. All the while being bombarded by automatic emails of mostly irrelevant nature and out of sync with what was happening.
A banker from another bank later told me that wealth is best explained by employment only. And that a gift from 15 years ago is not relevant.
I don’t understand how a modern bank can be so sensitive about mainstream crypto (BTC, ETH). Maybe my cognitive bubble is shielding me from this world.
Any similar experiences from other forum members?
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Had the same with Swissquote, my application was stalled for weeks, so were the transferred funds - not even automatic emails. Once you add something more than just employment, things can get complicated, even if everything is crystal clear.
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If it’s not more than, say, 30% of the income, I would venture to put just my salary as the source of funds.
It’s anyway all mental accounting/bucketing -
You could always claim “No sir, those 10k that I put into broker account were from income, the 5k I got from dividends and the rental - I spent on living costs.” 
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I onboarded someone I know, and I can sign below that. Took them over 30 days to enable the transfer of the 1 mio CHF required for the sign-on VIP status (customer support then extended the sign-on transfer period). They even independently crawled the registers of commerce and came back with strange questions.
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