You are right. The UI is just pretty bad …
This is indeed worth a thought. I would have added Switzerland as well (even though its a small one). US and Switzerland with TW, Europe ex. Switzerland, Japan, APAC, Canada & EM with FP.
The more I think about it - the less I understand TW’s strategy. What’s in for them? Kind of doesn’t make much sense to me… do they know what they are doing?
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A few other things I’ve noted:
- For the non-pension fund investments, you’ll be paying stamp tax and won’t get the withholding tax back. That’s in addition to higher TER.
- They have a currency conversion fee of 0.1%.
- They theoretically have a fee of 0.225%, they currently choose not to charge it, but may do so at any time. If you’re serious about having 0% fees, why not change the regulations? This way, it looks more like the strategy “let’s use these 0% fees as a marketing tool to increase our AuM, and after a while start charging fees.”
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1/ Swiss index funds are not subject to stamp duty. In addition, funds that distribute dividends are initially subject to withholding tax. However, this is reclaimed by our pension foundation from the Federal Tax Admin and refunded to the client in the form of a cash distribution. In the case of accumulating Swiss funds, they are also withholding tax neutral.
And for the US and global REIT investments, as mentioned above, there are the pension fund share classes.
2/ Thanks to netting and pooling, the effective FX markup is lower for 3a.
3/ It’s been 0% since 2022 and there are no plans to change it. There would be half a year’s lead time if it were to be surprisingly enacted by the 3a pension foundation.
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@True_Wealth Do you reclaim withholding tax for your non-US equity funds?
Uh, nice! 99% of the mentioned CSIF (CH) III Equity US Blue - Pension Fund QB results in following overview of costs:
Finpension uses the ZB version of it (if I am right, ZB version is available for all (?) investors and QB only for professional clients?). But why does the ZB version has an TER of 0.02%, and the QB 0.15% p.a.? This also leads in a much better performance of ZB during all these years.
Ah crap, just switched to finpension. It seems, I have to check TW in more detail, since 0.15% vs. 0.39% p.a. fee is quite a difference 
What are your thoughts?
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FB is the version for retail customers: highest TER, anyone can buy shares. QB has slightly lower TER, is restricted to qualified investors (and intermediaries) and there may be a minimum investment amount. DB and ZB share classes have even lower TER but require a contract of the wealth manager with CSIF where (at least for ZB) there will be management fees outside the TER.
As you’ve already mentioned, the sum of TER and wealth management fee is what matters, of course. At least for the US, TrueWealth 3a is now clearly the best offer with regards to fees, as far as I can tell. Likely also overall but you may not be able to have exactly the same strategy as at other providers (I myself prefer being able to choose a market cap-weighted world allocation).
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If you decide to make a geographic split of the portfolio, the most logical first step is to invest to US stocks market via a US ETF. Therefore I really don’t understand this excitement about the US index fund.
I will keep an eye on this offer to see if they can provide a reasonable collection of funds to construct MSCI World ex US (ex CH), but for now the proposed funds for stock markets ex US and ex CH is a mess.
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I will personally still not switch. To me, the biggest risk on 3a is that I am somewhen forced to get out of the market if I need to switch providers. TW is too small and in my view not 100% clear in what they are doing. If they 3-5 years down the line close the shop - that can force me out of the market for a few weeks until I can re-invest post the transfer. Based on this logic, I as well stay with Frankly and Viac. Didn’t happen yet but will over the next 2-3 years (using mew investments as an offset) migrate FP over to Viac.
Of course, they always could change their pricing model, but same can happen with any other provider. IMO you have to check out the currently best offer in the market which also looks serious. If a lot of clients switch from viac / finpension / frankly to True Wealth, it puts some pressure on these, and hopefully they will lower their prices again (IIRC all of these providers have actually lowered their prices a bit when True Wealth entered the market two years ago). And even if they would apply the 0.225% fees, they would still be cheaper than any other provider I am aware of. If you assume the TER of 0.15% of the US instrument on average, you basically miss out 0.24% performance compared to the other cheap providers - this adds up over the year.
A longer time ago, I was also in contact with True Wealth and I also questioned their “pricing”. They also explained me that it helps them to gain new clients for their non-3a-product where you have to pay fees. I am sure most of us are not their target users for their non-3a-solution. - but why not profit from it? 
Some details I have also found on their website: The cost regulations of the pension foundation mention an administrative fee. Why does the website say that the offer is free of charge?
Regarding the 0.1% FX markup: I think this mostly applies to their non-3a product, since most of the funds (in my portfolio) are bought in CHF anyway.
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Same here. What a pity, TW has missed a great opportunity to place themselves ahead of the competition without any apparent reason. It’s as easy as offering some standard world equity index fund (reclaiming WHT)
Do they refund WHT on their other funds too? Refunding WHT for a CH-fund may be easy, but for other regions (EU, Asia etc)?
Yes, looks like that for any other fund I have checked. In my understanding, @True_Wealth also clearly confirmed a few posts above, that they reclaim WHT, and now use pension funds where foreign WHT is involved.
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They reclaim Swiss withholding tax, which is not due on funds in the 3a custody account.
The foreign withholding tax can be only reclaimed by a fund (class) with a controlled investor group. These have “Pension fund” in the name. 4 of such funds available at TW are listed above. And none of them is interesting to me personally.
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Thx for clarifying this 
Theoretically, could True Wealth reclaim WHT for non-pension funds? That’s what Finpensions planning to do for its robo-investing, or am I mistaken?
that’s what finpension is trying to do, this is very much untested and unknown which cantons will accept it.
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Getting a Swiss tax credit for foreign L1WHT is something completely different than getting a refund of L1WHT. I don’t see how the former could be possible for 3a as you don’t pay Swiss taxes on 3a. The latter is presumably already done to the extent possible/worthwhile by the mentioned ‘Pension Fund’ index funds but I don’t know whether that would be possible for any stock domiciles besides US and Japan.
I.e., I don’t know whether there is any tax disadvantage investing in EU using a regular ETF in 3a compared to investing via the CSIF World Pension Fund Plus (besides stamp duty).
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If anything, it actually should be more advantaged to invest in European stocks via an Irish (or Luxembourg) ETF than via a Swiss index fund in 3a.
Hmm, now I am getting interested: no, not with this selection of funds…
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I actually think using an ETF for EU in this case makes more sense, since it is cheaper than an world index fund: CSIF (CH) III Equity World ex CH - Pension Fund QB CH0191014973 has a TER of 0.15% while HSBC EURO STOXX 50 UCITS ETF IE00B4K6B022 TER is only 0.05%. Since the ETF is with domicile IE, there should also be no lost WHT in my understanding. The downside is of course that you have to pay stamp duty, but on the other hand there is no subscription (0.08%) and redemption fee (0.03%). For me, it looks like True Wealth is using the more expensive pension funds for classes where you would loose WHT with an ETF, and for other areas cheaper ETFs when available. This makes sense to me, since it leads to a lower average TER than just using a world pension fund.
Same is for true for emerging markets: if they would use the CS index fund, you would have to pay a subscription (0.16%) and redemption fee (1.16%, which is insane) with a TER of 0.25% (CH0185709083). Instead they use iShares Core MSCI EM IMI UCITS ETF IE00BKM4GZ66 with a TER of 0.18% in my portfolio.
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Is there a list of all their 3a options? If you want to optimize you taxable and 3a accounts, this could be quite interesting.