Where is it safe to have all your cash money in Switzerland?

Banks, Insurances & Third Pillar
1

Hello all :slight_smile:

Thanks for reading my post, as I am a complete novice. But I do like this website for the simple answer!

So here is my simple question:

**I have recently relocated from another country. My money is about to be transferred to Switzerland too. **
**We talk about more than 200CHF. **
Where should I transfer it? Ideally to keep it safe, and eventually to make it work a bit.

So far I receive my salary in Neon but I would not trust them to keep my 200K CHF.
Any bank to advise here?

thank you all for your help, really appreciate it :slight_smile:

2

Safe is such an overloaded word. Come to think of it, nowhere is 100% safe, there are always some risks. What risks are important for you, what are you trying to avoid, why avoid your neon acc?

For protection against bank banruptcy: at a basic level all swiss accs are insured up to 100k per bank, so just open another acc at another bank to put the second 100k there, But esisuisse has an aggregate coverage limit of just a few billion or so across whole of switzerland…

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3

Every Bank in Switzerland is backed by the Esisuisse up to 100k / Client. Keep in mind that Esisuisse is a Fund and is limited to a certain upper limit.

As with nearly everything in life: you get what you pay for. I personally dont like Neon and Zak.

Safety and Return are two contradicting principles, you cant get them both.

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4

I assume you mean Client, not bank :wink:

5

Per client+bank. So, per bank from your PoV

6

I’d just invest the 200k CHF if not needed for immediate living expenses (keep an emergency fund in cash tho).

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7

Maybe I’m misremembering, but I think PostFinance accounts are free once you have more than CHF 25k in assets.
You can definitely consider PostFinance to be safe for those amounts.

8

They have changed it. Now you need to have 25k in PF investment assets. I have more than that in cash and they charge me 5 CHF per month for the basic account. In the good old days one only needed 7 kCHF in cast to qualify for a free basic account.

I believe banks have to pay negative interest on large CHF amounts. There have already been talks of passing the negative interest to customers who have more than 100 kCHF so that’s another good reason to split it between two banks. PF pays 0.00% interest ATM.

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9

I think that’s inevitable.

If the central banks want to boost inflation, there won’t be a way around it. And then it’s a matter of time until banks begin to pass on negative interest rates also to small retail customers.

10

True. Even IBKR warns that CHF accrues negative interest once transferred there. For small amounts they waive it but at some point your balance could take a hit there if the money stays in CHF for a longer time.

11

That said, it’s a bit more complicated (there’s an exemption based on reserve requirements for domestic banks accounts at the SNB).

See point 4 of https://www.snb.ch/en/mmr/reference/repo_mb28/source/repo_mb28.en.pdf
(currently threshold factor is 30)