Can Yuh dethrone neon?

Well, for most users not yet in my opinion, but Yuh has a few great starting points.

For some people Yuh can be the perfect personal Swiss bank account.

Yuh is available in more countries than neon and friends

neon is currently (2022) only available for full time and exclusive residents of Switzerland.

And the same goes for many other smartphone bank accounts in Switzerland, like Zak.

This means you can't use neon and their like if you have a dual residency, e.g. in Germany and Switzerland, and also not as a cross-border worker. So if you are one of the numerous people who work in Switzerland, but live in one of its neighboring countries, many bank accounts won't be available to you.

Even those banks who will accept you, tend to charge you between 300 and 500 CHF per year if you are a resident of another country.

Yuh to the rescue - at least for cross-border workers and soon-to-be expats from Switzerland's immediate neighbors. If you live in Germany, France, Austria, Italy or Liechtenstein, you can also open a Yuh account. And you don't even need to pay those hefty additional account fees that are typical for so many banks in Switzerland for non-local residents.

Especially in that transition period, the three months before relocating to Switzerland or the first month after relocating to Switzerland, Yuh can make getting started with Swiss banking so much easier.

I really hope that Yuh will be available to residents from more countries.

So far that option to deal with CHF through a Swiss bank with a Swiss IBAN is really missing internationally. Swiss banks used to charge too much for that service, Wise and Revolut don't offer it, because they don't have a Swiss IBAN. Sending Swiss Francs from another country to a Swiss bank account and vice versa easily can cost 20 CHF in fees from the SWIFT system.

neon and Zak, if you are listening, you need to fix this. Switzerland is not an island.

Yuh can be opened immediately when you live in one of the neighboring countries

As I wrote above, the Yuh account can be opened if you live in one the five neighboring countries of Switzerland.

This is often a huge benefit for expats from those neighboring countries: You can open the account as a cross-border worker (Grenzgänger) while you don't live in Switzerland and you can open the account upfront while you are still in the process of moving to Switzerland but before you have the Swiss work/residence permit card.

Yuh is a package of saving and investing

Most smartphone and no-frills bank accounts in Switzerland are focused on just a savings account and only CHF.

Zak tries to combine it a bit by offering some Pillar 3a additions, but there is no possibility to do any stock trading with low fees so far.

neon is a pure savings account and it does not seem like neon will offer any stock investment options any time soon.

CSX does have investment options, but the products they included are not great.

Yuh by contrast packages saving in multiple currencies with stock investing.

If you are looking for a modern less-frills smartphone based option, Yuh is probably the best combo of savings account + some stock investing.

Yuh copies great features from Revolut and Wise

"Good artists copy, great artists steal."

Yuh has copied a few features that Revolut and friends made popular:

• Fractional shares: You can invest in parts of an Alphabet stock for example if the whole is too expensive for you when you start with only 100 CHF.
• Holding multiple currencies under one account to hedge against exchange rate changes.



Fees are higher than neon (and Revolut/Wise)

Compared to the "originals" like Wise, Revolut, neon, Interactive Brokers and so on, the fees of Yuh are still comparatively high though.

If you withdraw cash (outside of Switzerland) it costs you 4.90 each time.

That's a lot when you consider that often you only withdraw the equivalent of 100 or 200 CHF at a time.

Revolut by contrast charges only a minimum of 1 pound on their free plan.

neon charges a straight 1.50%.

Both are lower when withdrawing 100-200 CHF in cash outside of Switzerland.

But that is not it: Yuh charges a 0.95% currency conversion fee in addition.

So, if you withdraw the equivalent of 100 CHF in a local currency other than CHF with Revolut and Wise it often costs you nothing up to max. 2 CHF, with neon it costs 1.50 CHF and with Yuh a whopping 6.40 CHF. So that's effectively 6.4% unless of course you withdraw much larger amounts at which that percentage would decrease a lot again.

I know, banks have to make money.

Even Wise and Revolut charge a bit these days, be it through a percentage or a monthly account charge.

But if you compare Wise and Yuh for example, Yuh's 0.95% is more than double of what Wise charges (0.4%) at the moment for foreign currency transfer and in the cash withdrawal case Yuh fares much worse.

If you often send money abroad in a different currency, Yuh and neon have similar fees. That is assuming of course that you send money in the most convenient way directly from your account without using Wise, Revolut and others as tools. If you do use Wise and friends, you can save even more.

Example: If you want to send 1'000 EUR to your friend in Germany or to your brokerage account in EUR at a German bank (based on the current fees in November 2022):

• Wise would charge a fee of ca. 4.81 CHF or 0.49% of the sum in CHF, while you have to transfer the money from your Swiss bank account to Wise first, or a slightly lower fee if you already have CHF on your Wise account and use that balance immediately,
• neon would charge a fee of ca. 8.23 CHF or 0.83% of the sum in CHF, while the money is directly taken from your neon account with no extra steps. neon actually uses Wise in the background and transparently charges an extra 0.4% on top of what Wise charges.
• Yuh would charge a fee of ca. 9.45 CHF or 0.95% of the sum in CHF, while the money is directly taken from your Yuh account with no extra steps.

Please note that these fees might change over time, so always check the current price list and conditions.

So you can see that once more Yuh is more expensive than it's most cost-efficient competitors (esp. Wise without intermediaries). But compared to neon, the fees are similar and you get a more comprehensive service with Yuh.

And compared to the usual 2-3% that most Swiss banks charge, Yuh as a Swiss bank account, has much lower fees while providing convenience and the other benefits of a real Swiss bank account.

You can try out Yuh for free immediately.



Download the app first and then use my code dzuwf3 to get a discount in the form of Swissqoins.