In the previous articles, we talked about Revolut, its benefits and deficiencies as well as the Swiss alternatives like CLER's ZAK, neon and CSX.

While it makes sense for many reasons to have your main account with a Swiss bank, you can get "the best of both worlds" by combining a Swiss bank account with a non-Swiss account like Revolut or TransferWise.

What makes a Swiss bank account basically necessary is that you will practically need a CH IBAN to collect your monthly salary, something that no foreign fin tech currently offers, as well as the ability to easily pay Swiss payslips ("ESR").

Exchange rates will kill you

Handling foreign currencies like EUR or USD on the other hand is not really nicely implemented with any of the Swiss providers yet. For example, neither ZAK, neon nor CSX allow you to keep foreign currency on a sub-account nor to receive foreign currency without converting it to CHF. And currency exchange rates tend to be quite bad with most of the Swiss bank offerings. They are only OK if you rarely exchange money and only small amounts (worth less than 500 CHF).

You will easily end up paying at least 2.5% of conversion fees for a simple currency exchange between major currencies like CHF and EUR with most banks. Let's say you pay your first month's rent in EUR, letting the bank convert it for you. In Zürich, that rent might be about 1'500 CHF. 2.5% of that is 37.5 CHF. And yes, the exchange rates are typically that bad even with the "hip" new Swiss fin tech offers named above. On top of that, the SWIFT system might be involved, so there will probably be additional fees of 10-20 CHF. You will quickly end up paying 50 CHF in fees for that single transaction.

 Those fees are often hidden in the exchange rate, or not even clear upfront at all. Especially the SWIFT fees are often only visible on your account statement a month later and require a close look. Typically, there is no invoice, no receipt, explanation, nothing. You just receive an unfairly low amount of CHF when sending a foreign currency to a Swiss account when you don't pay attention. And the same goes of course if you send the money to someone else, like your landlord or so.

And if that were not bad enough, the very same can and will happen when your new employer sends you your first month's salary to a foreign account, e.g. in some other European country.

This is one of the few topics where it is not so nice at first that Switzerland is a bit isolated with its own special currency and practically no consumer-friendly regulation around cross-border or cross-currency transactions.

Revolut and friends to the rescue

Luckily, you can use both Revolut and TransferWise to send and receive CHF while you don't have a Swiss bank account yet, e.g. because you didn't have your work permit card from day one.

And you can also use them any time after that to properly convert CHF to other currencies like the EUR if you need to pay somebody in EUR without giving away many percents to the greedy banks.

So whenever you pay someone in EUR, send the CHF first to your Revolut or TransferWise account. Often you can do this as a repeating transfer. Let's say you want to support the local rabbit breeder's association in your old home country with a monthly donation. You will know the amount in EUR and the approximate amount in CHF. So just set up a repeating transfer in CHF from your Swiss account (e.g. neon) to Revolut/TW.

Then you can also set up a repeating transfer from your Revo/TW account with an automatic currency conversion to the recipient.

Nowadays, Revolut even supports SEPA Direct Debits with automatic currency conversion, although the feature is really hidden deep inside the app.