As far as I know, Saxo’s customer support was overloaded last year. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s still the case today. They have grown significantly, which naturally has consequences.
Saxo Bank ist in der Schweiz in den vergangenen Jahren deutlich gewachsen. Im vergangenen Jahr konnte die Anzahl Kunden verdoppelt werden und bei den Kundengeldern legte die Bank um 55 Prozent zu. 2025 will Saxo den Kundenstamm erneut verdoppeln.
Interesting that a broker is so touchy about money possibly coming from investments/dividends… I suppose that’s the second thing to do before FIRE’ing:
Apply for a few (free) credit cards that you may need in the next years (they don’t like when you say “ah, I have no regular income, I live off my savings”)
Open any broker accounts you may need in the next years.
Just wanted to share I moved ETFs from IB to both Saxo and Swissquote . I only got one questionnaire from Saxo and that was enough.
I think you are right. I feel it might have something to do with Wealth / Income ratio. If you have much higher wealth versus your income, they might have to do even more checks for compliance.
What is weird is that if this wealth is declared in income tax returns for previous years then it means Swiss tax office has no issue. So why Saxo has issue? Could it be that Saxo doesn’t have access to tax returns and hence they need to do assessment independently?
Based on my recent experiments with Saxo: You can only withdraw money to an account where you funded from (common compliance requirement among brokers. Swissquote is an exception I believe - because they have a banking license?). I don’t think transferring stock from IBKR would count as funding. If your withdrawal target account is in CHF, Saxo will either convert your USD dividends to CHF during the transfer, or you have to convert manually to CHF first. In both cases, Saxo probably takes ~1% exchange fee. Also note that it is not completely straightfoward to open a USD subaccount in Saxo (with IB you automatically get currency subaccounts).
I would also assume that Saxo - being a Swiss broker like Swissquote - will withhold the additional 15% withholding tax on dividends from US equities like VTI. You will only get that back when you file your taxes a year later.
My suggestion would be to always test first with small but real equities / currencies that closely match your intended scheme.
For me, this is more of a security feature. I feel safer if someone who breaks into my account can only send money to accounts that have been used for deposits in the past.
And opening a sub currency account is very simple. It’s online and doesn’t take long
The main point to know is that for Saxo, the shares should be stored in right account. Otherwise dividends would get automatically converted to currency of sub account
For example if investor wants VTI dividends to remain in USD, then it’s better to store VTI shares in USD subaccount. if VTI shares are held in CHF subaccount then dividend would be automatically converted to CHF with markup of 0.25%
Does anyone here hold U.S.-domiciled ETFs with Saxo? I’m a bit worried about the W-8BEN process. Their customer service told me I have to send the form by email, and there’s no way to check in the app whether I’m certified or not.
My concern is that I have no real control: what if they forget to save it after I send it, or if it expires after three years and they don’t notify me? With IBKR and Schwab the process is automatic, but at Saxo it seems fully manual. I’m worried I’ll only realize something went wrong when they start withholding 30% instead of 15%.
Has anyone had experience with this? Any stories to share?
While Swiss brokers will always withhold a total of 30% on US dividends, it makes a big difference whether it’s 30% US WHT (without W-8 BEN) or a combination of 15% US WHT + 15% additional Swiss withholding (with W-8 BEN). In the former case, you’d completely lose 15% of the dividends (unless you make the effort to get a 15% refund directly from the IRS).
My understanding with eg swissquote (but maybe any swiss QI broker) is that if you declare yourself as swiss resident during onboarding it’s sufficient.
Many brokers indeed use tax residency information from the regular signup process as W-8 BEN substitute. This is not specific to Swiss brokers as e.g. IBKR does (or at least did) the same. However, not all brokers make it obvious whether any further action is required, unfortunately.
Not my experience with Swissquote. In my case they just silently paid the other 15% to the Uncle Sam instead of our beloved Helvetia. I only found out when my R-US was denied.
It can be seen, but one needs to know where to look. I just saw 30% and assume it’s the known annoyance of the Swiss legislation aiming to disadvantage local brokers. Luckily my lesson was not that expensive (a few hundreds, if I remember correctly).
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