Easy to open

Opening the account is relatively well done: You only have to download the app from the Swiss App Store / Play Store. Then you identify yourself through a video call with your ID.

A few minutes later, your (possibly first) Swiss bank account is ready. You get the IBAN immediately. This can be a very nice and important feature if you are a new expat in Switzerland. You will often have this problem that you begin your work on e.g. April 01, but you only move to and register your residence in Switzerland a couple of days earlier. By that time, you will have a residence registration confirmation, but not your official work permit card yet. But the employer might want to know the IBAN to send the money to at the end of the month already. At least when we did it, Bank CLER would accept the simpler residence registration from the townhall while other banks insisted that I wait to get the work permit card. That can be annoying, because it may take weeks until you get that card. Not having a local Swiss bank account in that time can be quite annoying.

Vaults for saving for different goals



Instant transfer to other Zak users

If you are out with your friends and want to split a bill without cash, you can immediately transfer some money to your friends through Zak if they also use the app.

Since Zak also supports TWINT, you can connect Zak to TWINT and then use that instead if your friends don’t have Zak but TWINT. The latter is more likely if live in Switzerland, because TWINT is a payment service that supports most banks so chances are better that your friends will have that vs. also using Zak.

Zaktionen

They always give you some deals where you can convert part of the incomes to your account into a voucher. For example, once your monthly salary arrives, they will offer you a voucher where you can pay a small sum and then get a voucher for a larger sum to buy something in a shop. Personally I never used it and don’t like such offers, because I am not a fan of such bundling. You tend to get stuff you don’t really need or want at intransparent prices.

What annoys me: Not native and not quite reliable

I have been using Zak for a while now, but I will slowly transition away to neon. The app on iOS is not native. It is a web application wrapped into a pseudo-app. I don’t like that, because web apps have bad usability.

The login also was somewhat unreliable. Every now and then, the layout of the login screen was weirdly messed up. Sometimes I was able to login inspite of that, sometimes I had to wait a day. That should not happen!

 I wrote to the support that they should build a proper native app like neon and others, but they don’t seem to care. They even refused to reveal what framework they used, after I accused them of using Ionic (a toolset which packages web apps into pseudo-apps).

Customer service so so

I wrote the customer service a couple of times. They always answer quickly and are friendly, but they don’t seem to care at all if you tell them that something does not work. I had an issue once where an ESR slip was not working from a utility company. The Zak team said: The font is wrong on the ESR slip. It turned out they were right, but - what the hell? Yes, there is a Swiss standard, but who cares about the font of the number on the ESR slip as long as it is readable. So I had to transfer everything manually by typing everything in. Very annoying. Another Swiss bank app I tried was able to scan the ESR.

The Zak customer service insisted that they are doing everything right. And that no major adjustments on the app side would be necessary or possible. This is one of the reasons why I am moving to neon. You should not stick with a bank that can't afford to build a proper app.

No export, no API

Another thing is really annoying: As an expat, you must have two accounts. For example, you have one in CHF, let’s say Zak, but then you need another one EUR from your old bank in a different country or Revolut etc. To keep an overview, you want to import everything into an app like Mint, MoneyMoney, Numbrs and the like.

With Zak, this is not possible. There is no CSV export, no API, nothing to export your transactions. This is embarrassing. I told the Zak support a year ago and they were like: Yeah, we don’t care. 

So unless you only have a bank account in CHF and Zak is your absolute only bank account (which is probably not realistic) it’s not good to keep an overview. You will easily lose track of your finances, because Bank CLER is so stubborn and does not want to include this technologically simple feature. neon and many others have a CSV or MT940 export.

Insufficient account statements

Another annoyance is that on the PDF account statements, you can’t see the IBAN where money is coming from or going to. You only see the name and sometimes an address, but sometimes you don’t see much info what a transaction is about, not even the reference text. So it may be a bit difficult to decipher at the end of the year where your money went in all cases.

Overall

Thanks for starting it, Zak and Bank Cler, but the product lacks serious commitment from the technical side and some simple features. It feels like as if you developed it for a year and then you cut all R&D budget, hoping that people would flock in and use a buggy app that lacks many of Revolut’s features.

If you consider Zak, I would recommend you first take a look at neon. Chances are you will prefer neon and then you can skip Zak.