Has anybody looked at the St Columbanus product offering or other similar ones?
Are there any gotchas to look out for or that someone has spotted?
I was surprised to learn that a much higher interest rate is offered in Switzerland with a € a/c (2%) over a SwFr a/c (0.45%).
It sounds like an interesting option to me....
Well I'm sure I covered some of this before, but here goes:
- First of Swiss banks do not have a government guarantee scheme like the EU, there is a private scheme operated by the banks themselves, but it has some important differences: cover for a single bank is 6b which is nothing for a Swiss bank. Some where like [broken link removed], a small regional bank has over 15b in assets. So getting a 100K per customer is in question...
- Swiss banks do fail and are let go bankrupt: two banks and a stock broker have gone to the wall since 1993 alone. The general expectation is that unless it is one of the "too big to fail" banks, it will be let go to the wall without government intervention.
- As stated by Columbanus, it is true that most banks do not have a minimum deposit requirement to open a savings account with them, however most will require a residence permit because the effort involved in opening an account for a non resident makes it uninteresting for the bank!
- If you qualify as a private banking client (lets say at least 3M on deposit), then you can deal directly with the bank without any problems, so why pay an extra fee to Columanus???
- If you hold an American passport or hold a Green card, then you are not welcome at all! US tax rules impose such high admin. costs on Swiss banks that about 18 months ago most of the major banks asked US clients to close their accounts. As of about 6 months ago banks started to close all remaining accounts automatically.
The bottom line is that unless you qualify as a private banking client, there is not much chance that you will be able to open an account with one of the top flight Swiss banks. So I'd be very interested to hear from someone who availed of the services offered by Columanus AG's services....
Jim (Switzerland)
PS - People put their money in the CHF for safety, not for the return and Swiss banks know it, so there is no need to offer a high interest rate.
