I don’t think the assets held at VIAC are any safer versus Finpension or Swissquote or even IBKR.
Unless brokerages are committing fraud, if you own an ETF or a Fund, it shouldn’t matter
I think these 100K guarantees are for uninvested cash
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I’d say taking a margin loan to finance a downpayment is a matter of asset allocation. It allows for a more agressive allocation for those for whom it makes sense but many people could be better served by a more conservative allocation than a heavily leveraged, stocks/single real estate asset heavy one.
Sweet summer child 
What you’re actually holding are a set of emails. For almost everything else, you are depending on your counterparty’s own internal processes and congruent legal systems.
Fraud is quite a big thing already. But there are more fun ways to lose money! See Synapse for an example.
TL;DR: Synapse’s IT is defunct and the bankruptcy estate cannot figure which customer owns which part of the various omnibus accounts. I suggest reading the article not just the TL;DR, it’s quite amusing and instructive also.
If we exclude both fraud and incompetence… Well the world would be a lot better already. Unfortunately, there would still be ways to lose money. Just less fun ones. For example you may have (knowingly or not, due to settlement delays) used margin in which case you are no longer eligible for many of the protections that IBKR claims to offer.
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How pleasant.
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So just we are clear
You are saying ViAC is more safe to keep assets versus Finpension, IBKR, Swissquote, Degiro & Saxo because how VIAC handle assets.
I am not competent to understand the segregation, custodian banks etc. but I would be very surprised if that is accurate representation of reality.
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Mostly yes. I have not compared eg: Swissquote VS VIAC.
Generally speaking I expect that an account held under my name at a known bank in well-regulated country will be safer than shared accounts at unnamed “financial institutions” in “various countries”.
Here’s what IBKR’s bot responds when I ask it where are my assets held:
For customers of Interactive Brokers (U.K.) Limited, funds may be held either directly with IB LLC (the US entity) or with a designated financial institution where IBKR LLC maintains a customer account. These funds are maintained in customer accounts held in the name of IBKR LLC and are located outside of the U.K. The specific location of custody assets, derivatives positions, and client money can vary and may include different depositories, custodians, clearing houses, and bank accounts in various countries.
Then these are just my personal heuristics. I shouldn’t have been so sarcastic in my post earlier, apologies to @assemblyrequired .
To be honest, I don’t feel competent to understand the way IBKR is setup 
I struggled to understand Viac already because it had documents in German. I’m not working in finance either and would be very curious to learn what people think of eg: Swissquote VS Bank Wir.
PS: I will write to IBKR’s customer service and ask where are my assets held, I’m curious now.
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4 posts were merged into an existing topic: Swiss brokers [2024]
Thanks for sharing. I truly hope that the situation is still fresh, and it won’t be long before they figure it out. It’s a lame excuse to return money to some customers and punt on the others just because there are no money. All customers should be proportionally affected and collectively bear the costs of figuring things out.
Is anyone a rather long term user of VIAC Invest? I currently have my 3a with VIAC, and I am looking into investing money on ETFs. VIAC invest sounds a reasonable way to do so, if I want to avoid the IBKR barrier.
Interested in discussing that! Thank you!
I hold a small fun position with Viac (couple of Ks). Their performancd is actually quite good, IF you are a balanced investor. Its very smooth to let them rebalance. It doesnt make much sense for 100% Shares Portfolio.
IBKR is always cheaper than a normal Bank (like Postfinance), which is still cheaper than VIAC Invest.
If You want to go robo advisor aka a trull hands off solution, I would go to VIAC but not Finpension and the likes.
However @VIAC things could still be much better if they added a SmallCap Index Fund and one way or another of making sure we had market cap weight in bespoke strategies. Either a MSCI World Fund, their own Fund of Funds or a tweak to the UI where You can soecify a % of Global Market Cap weight and they manage the Index funds accordingly.
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May I ask why you prefer Viac over Finpension?
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What’s your PF there?
I would have liked to see Swiss RE.
I hold:
- 15% Cash
- 9% Corp Bond CHF
- 8% Aggregate Bond CHF
- 13% Switzerland
- 15% North America
- 15% Europe
- 13% Pacific
- 3% Emerging Markets
- 1% Global Reit
- 8% Gold
Essentiall, its a diversified 60/40 with some gold. I heavily miss Small Caps, the option to (parially) go with Market Cap Weight Global Shares, Hedged Corporate Bonds and RE Funds.
The Absence of RE Funds hurts a lot but I understand why Index Funds (Gating) coild be challenging and why the don’t want zo offer ETF. The solution @VIAC was an ETF within an Index Fund, as the ETF had better liquidity than the underlying. Yet, thats difficult to sell to customers.
Why I prefer it over finpension? reduced Hacking or fuckup risk and simpler tax declaration (WHT always applies).
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I have a few k at VIAC Invest and Finpension Invest (gifted the money to a child, and invested it for payout at 18, currently in my name). I wanted to keep this money separate from mine, and also wanted to test the products.
Both are pretty much the same IMO in operation and products offered.
I’d go for Finpension for the special tax service* they offer, whereby they calculate for you how much their Irish ETF’s lost in US withholding tax for all the US shares, for you to get it “angerechnet”/credited acc. to DTA, as if you were holding these shares personally. This should equate to an approx 0.3% advantage over Irish ETF’s with US holdings held elsewhere (Viac Invest, Postfin, etc.)
If you consider this, Finpension fees with the tax advantage added on can drop to ~0.2% (0.39% - 0.19% (66% x 0.3%)) for a world portfolio, which is pretty good for the package offered.
.* Before people ask me if that worked for 2025, due to only starting and slowly funding this account last year, I only had a total of CHF 10 in dividends at Finpension Invest in 2025, so it did not show the CHF 1 which I could probably get credited on DA-1 (probably Finpens don’t bother if it is below a certain threshhold).
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Is there a reason they couldn’t wrap the UBS Real Estate CH index fund (which they’re offering in 3a) in one of their own index funds? Yes, the TER would be high if you include the fees of the individual real estate funds, but that’s just how it is. They could still leave it out of the standard strategies to not discourage customers to keep the average TER of the standard strategies down. However, I don’t see a reason why they aren’t offering it for custom strategies (except that they think there wouldn’t be enough demand to warrant the cost of setting up a new fund).
The Problem with ALL Index Funds on Swiss Real Estate Fun Indices is that they apply Gating. Meaning that the Fund may prevent redemptions if required (e.g. insufficient liquidity on the actual real estate fund shares held by the Index fund). From a logic point of view, that actually makes sense. Swiss Real Estate Funds are a somewhat “vulnerable” asset class and if we faced a serious real estate crisis, you wouldn’t want that the Index Funds (as they were held by pension funds) went belly up as they simply don’t find any buyers for the fund shares they need to sell (remember the difference among ETF and Index Funds here).
When you have a close look at it, you realise that the gating levels applied are fairly strict, meaning if shit hits the fan - we would be in such situation for quite a few months worst case. Clearly, an Investment where people can’t withdraw their money from is outside of the remit of what VIAC can offer its customers.
A solution may be if they didn’t structure their fund so that it does not hold real estate Index funds, but a real estate ETF. Reason beeing is that ETF can provide higher liquidity than the actual, underlying fund constitutents had. There is research on this from bond funds (remember, bonds are not that liquid by definition as well). This way, they could have their VIAC fund, that held lets say an UBS ETF covering Swiss Real Estate Funds… and in case of liquidation, there should still be some liquidity given the ETF in between. This then leads to a situation where a fund can still process leavers requests without putting the Investment of remainig investors at risk. So the reason why Gating was applied at an Index Fund level was somewhat mitigated. However, this resulted into a TER over TER situation, which was probably not that easy to explain. My hope however is that VIAC eventually, and as they grow their Invest business, still does it to complement its offering. Meaning, they create a VIAC fund that comes with reduced VIAC Fund Management Fees, so that the total VIAC Fund TER was still somewhere in the range of 0.2 to 0.3%.
The alternative was if VIAC offered to purchase ETF. But this would be a material change from their (in my view right and justified) way of how they actually process investments. Meaning that they would get one step closer to a “normal” robo advisor that just purchases ETF. Meaning, they lose their USP and thats probably nothing that they would even want to think about.
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Thanks for elaborating. SXI RE funds such as UBS SIMA are all listed on SIX (as required by the index rulebook) and thus seem to be tradable whenever the exchange is open. Gating may prevent redemption and this might push the price down on SIX, but shouldn’t all funds continue to be tradable on SIX even if there is gating at individual RE funds?
Maybe at a bad price but that would presumably also affect the price of SXI RE ETFs, same as SXI RE index funds. In what case would an SXI RE index fund need to use gating itself? Complete lack of liquidity for an underlying fund even on the exchange? The UBS index fund also allows for optimized sampling, with illiquidity of hodlings mentioned as possible reason in the prospectus.
Also, why would this be an issue for VIAC Invest but not VIAC 3a or finpension 3a, which both use SXI RE index funds?
Ah, found the relevant section in the prospectus of the UBS SXI RE index fund:
Ok, so gating may be used even when the underlying funds could technically be bought/sold but the price would be too far off. An ETF would typically remain tradable but not have such a protection, which could still be a concern for automated trades by a robo advisor.
The threshold for gating for the UBS SXI RE index fund is set at CHF 15 million (for the net subscription and redemption orders of a single day).
I can see how that may not be ideal for a robo advisor, but I still don’t see why offering it for custom strategies, maybe with a disclaimer, would be a fundamental issue (and in 3a it’s even in standard strategies, no disclaimer).
Interesting. So far, I considered VIAC Invest a normal robo advisor. It’s also listed on the moneyland comparison site for robo advisors. Do I understand correctly that the USP of VIAC is that they invest all the money into their own funds?
Is that a USP or a major downside?
VIAC Invest uses wrapper funds (by VIAC) that contain UBS institutional index funds.
Because they use investment funds and not ETFs, there is no stamp tax to be paid, which differentiates them from finpension and others.
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