Ah, so this was a just a joke, @anon95353169 ?
I’m sorry to see you have sold out to the ad business, Baptiste. I’ll ignore any of your “impartial” reviews in the future and focus on your quality content such as on SWR. At least you’re transparent enough to place a clear affiliate link disclosure, credit to you for that.
I’d like to repeat the points made above:
Also:
WTF?
Source?
Also I don’t really understand your reaction to Baptiste’s article. After all, he can do what he wants, right? You seem tired.
This is exaggerated and uncalled for. I won’t apply any sanctions for now, but be warned.
Yes, he can, and I can call him out for it. You seem biased. It’s iresponsible to call this advertisement article a “review”. There are too many of these totally paid-for reviews on the net, and I’m really sorry to see thepoorswiss joining in.
I agree. Calling Neon “The Best Swiss Digital Bank” is just utter nonsense given all the downsides they have.
Exactly my point 
I have no bias. I analyze Baptiste’s critiques and take away what seems relevant to me. All reviews, whether from Baptiste, MP, or any other blogger, reflect their personal opinion based on their use case. Some bloggers may be influenced by the benefits of referral programs, but it’s up to each reader to exercise discernment and form their own opinion.
As for me, I rely on my own analysis and critical thinking. Personally, I wouldn’t use Neon as my main daily solution. However, for the specific use I make of it, I’m satisfied.
I suggest we stop the digressions and return to the main topic.
Just an explanation: Everyone can create paid links of anything. It as sponsored as me telling you to pay with my Amex CC card (and then giving me back the money) so that I can earn the cashback. It’s a gray area of ads, but it’s more white than black. I’d say almost white. It’s not that the company contacted him and offered money. You can even create an insulting website about them and then add the link.
So the sentiment is understandable, but you are aiming at the wrong target.
Having said that, most of the reviews I see online should have a timestamp because things change so quickly that reviews should be sometimes rewritten.
I personally am wondering if Alpian is better than Neon now, at least for my use case.
The problem is, if I wrote a critical review of some neobank, no one would click on the link and I wouldn’t make any money. So the whole point of all the fake reviews on the net is to present marketing as objective reviews. To me, that’s no longer white, it’s gray at best.
It becomes black for me when a finfluencer like thepoorswiss irresponsibly starts advocating market orders instead of limit orders because his favorite affiliate link bank only offers market orders. There are many financially illiterate people out there who could be harmed by such advice.
I’m not against marketing, but I am against seemingly objective reviews that are completely biased by financial goals.
Of course, it’s my personal beef that I held thepoorswiss to a higher standard of integrity than just yet another marketing finfluencer. This came from a place of respect for his work.
I checked in on thepoorswiss intermittently over the years. Mostly out of curiosity or entertainment, as he is not presenting much that is new to me.
I have 2 points to make and a solution to offer.
Thepoorswiss decided one day to make money from blogging and kept at it. He took a writing class. He looks for what could be useful to his audience. He interacts with it. He rewrites old articles. He mentions pro and contra that are relevant. He seems to be working tenaciously to offer a good product to earn off it. He declares paid links in a generic manner. This whole package is not worthy of much blame for me.
However, the topic of “free” financial advice is real and capable of bringing a lot of harm to those that know little. There are generally conflicts of interest with free advice, e.g. also of banks. Most of us also know about the many and diverse videos of Plain Bagle about finfluencers in this regard.
So, this topic as a whole and specifically is worthy of discussion in a separate thread. I offer as possibility a title like “Free financial advice”.
Ok, I get your point. I’d like to have the time and energy to write like he does. Maybe I should start my site as well and just do reviews. I think I’ll be good at that but very bad at SEO/marketing. I’d write a similar post about neon, but surely with another title and different conclusions. I won’t make a classification of banks but more of a comparison with 0 conclusions.
Actually I did try to start somethig like that on github so that people can push changes…
This doesnt appeal to the lay audience that is to ‘lazy’ to educate themselves or read 10 articles to get some conclusion. Therefore I think it is perfectly fine to give some individual perspective.
Also keep in mind that ‘best bank’ can also be subjective depending on needs. Someone who values Fx more than interest would prefer Neon over Yuh for example. Or someone who checks their bank account mainly after work hours will see less of the maintenance outages than others.
Personally I don’t think Neon is competitive at this stage (I never used it myself), but I surely don’t think there is malicious intent at all. But yes, the Neon article would deserve an update.
The different comparators are great ‘unbiased’ resources ThePoorSwiss offers, but so far not for bank accounts. Probably also because the bank account offers change so frequently that its impossible to stay on top as a side hustle.
O do keep in mind it. That’s why I said that. You kind of contradict yourself 
Why? Cant u give rankings even though you have biases/personal opinions?
One option would be to present these biases more upfront (e.g. ‘i value x more than y thats why bank z is better for me then bank q’).
If you don’t give any ranking/advice, many people will fall into the trap of scammers that don’t hesitate to give clear recommendations.
Ok I think we meant more or less the same 
I don’t think it’s fair to blame thepoorswiss for claiming Neon is the best on paper. No one can reasonably be aware of all the outages and recurrent issues of all banking apps. Such a comparison can only exist on the basis of objective criteria, and as long as app availability isn’t objectively quantified for all apps, it can’t realistically be part of such comparison. That said it would be fair if the blog mentions that the app is often flaky, since the blogger must go through this as well).
Regarding affiliate links, I find it alright both for MP and tps as long as they are open about it, which they do through this banner. I didn’t check all the affiliate programs around, but it doesn’t seem to me like they are trying to maximise their affiliate program income by proposing banks/products which give the best rewards, instead they simply try to get rewards from the banks/products they consider the best for the FI/RE community.
All in all I find the critic a bit harsh. I highly appreciate both bloggers contributions, and in a world full of parasite influencer with zero added value, I wish more would be as dedicated and honest as these two. Now as with everything, it’s good to have help to take the first steps in a new environment, and it’s also normal once you’re more experienced to go your own way, eg by concluding after a while that this or that product is not the best anymore for you.
As someone who knew nothing about personal finances 4 years ago and who now has a NW I’d never have imagined reachable in my lifetime, I’m extremely thankful for the work MP and tps have done to teach non-finance people the basics of this domain. The fact I sometime disagree with this or that of their statements is actually the sign they’ve taught me well, I wouldn’t even have an opinion on these topics if it wasn’t for them.
For me, this is going in a direction that is not healthy or about the subject-matter. It weakens your argument when it is perceived as ad hominem.
A general comparison about conditions is not the same as a day-to-day account of service quality. Why not asking him directly to mention that such concerns exist in his post, if this is your issue? In my evaluation, there is a good chance, thepoorswiss will do it to better serve his audience.
Edit: So what are your criteria everyone should follow? It would be interesting to develop a few concise “Mustachian Principles for free financial advice”.
My first encounter with paid recommendations was roughly 10 years ago with peer lending. I work in law and would say I am not generally naive. However, the pure number and diversity of recommendations swayed me to invest a smallish amount of money. I did not lose much in the end. But risk-reward was awful.
It was hard for me to see that those recommendations were centrally engineered by financial incentives. Sites were reviewed before approval of sponsorships. The topics were often quite narrow and the writing imbued with faux objectivity. From reading, I did not realize the financial hook.
It seems to me that the financial advice industry (“it’s just entertainment!”) has since then much proliferated with crypto and stocks.
Agreed, it is extremely difficult to find truly unbiased reviews on the web these days. Unfortunately, it has become a fully monetized dump of ad revenue hungry guys looking for a quick passive income buck…
I wish there was something similar to Kassensturz, Stiftung Warentest etc. for the finance world.
