Hi everybody (and Daniel),
I’ve been thinking about this for some time. My perspective was that a highly performing bank should be able to offer a better rate for assets that give them some predictability (like term deposits - or bonus for periods without withdrawals, which is what the WIR bank is doing) because they are able to get better returns out of it, while a bank with poorer results couldn’t perform well enough to keep on with it.
I get that, in order to be profitable with money lended to them, they have to first beat the negative interest rates on the upgraded reserves they’re bound to have, then make good returns on the part of the money they can use for it AND take your credit-worthiness risk upon themselves, so I can understand why it’s not a solution offered to most retail investors but the WIR way to do it looked to me like they have good options for investing the money (typically Swiss SMEs) and could offer better returns because they actually knew what to do with your money (while most banks leave me under the impression that they wouldn’t know what to do with additional money except park it in the SNB, which strikes me as a strategy for poor performers).
So, I was under the impression that the WIR bank had a better banking model and/or was under better management than most other banks. Am I seriously delusional in this?