If you are not careful with currency conversion, you can lose big amounts of money with the big banks like PostFinance, USB or Credit Suisse.

A cash cow for the big banks

I have seen it so many times on Internet forums, Facebook groups and the like: "I simply use PostFinance to convert some CHF to EUR and set it to my bunny breeding club back home in Germany."

If you use the right provider like Revolut or TransferWise, this may work out well. Even with very new Swiss options like neon you can get a more reasonable deal.

But most big banks give you a bad rate where you easily can lose 2-3%. Often the fees are hidden in an unfair conversion rate. Imagine sending 1'000 CHF somewhere and the recipient only gets the real Euro value of 970 CHF. That is a loss of 30 CHF! You can go for lunch with that in expensive Zürich or buy the groceries to cook dinner for two people.

Don't make the mistakes like the others thinking that "no fee" means really no fee. As an exercise, try out PostFinance's calculator for international money transfers ("Rate Giro international").