thanks
is it possible to have a Swiss Bank account in US funds?
If you mean a dollar account, hm. Would probably only be UBS, Credit Suisse and PostFinance that might allow it.
No problem. Also, no interest.
I’m not so sure. If you take the question at face-value, I think many if not most Swiss banks would offer an account denominated in USD. Moreover, the act of owning a Swiss bank account in USD would not make the OP an ‘American Person’.
The real sticky issue for the banks will be whatever is driving the idea of having an account in USD. If the OP is an ‘American Person’ and the bank does not yet realize that, then this would definitely send up a red flag that that is the case. More likely, the OP would already be known to them as an ‘American Person’ and this will change the usual banking relationship in the usual ways.
In summary, it isn’t the possession of the USD account that is the problem, but that the kinds of people who want USD accounts tend to be the kinds of people who have complicated banking relationships in Switzerland because of their US connections.
We briefly had a US dollar account when we first moved here. The idea was to make it easier to pay our US taxes.
Not a great idea. First, no interest, as robBob mentioned. And this was back in the day when one still earned interest. Second, to open the account, the bank took our US dollars, converted them to Swiss francs, then back to US dollars (WTF?) taking their cut off the transactions.
Lesson learned, we closed that account. Now we just keep accounts at our US banks, one of which is the US affiliate of the Swiss bank. These function as completely separate entities, so transferring money is not seamless, but we rarely need to do that.
Keeping US bank accounts works for us, as we have on-going US transactions. We also keep the bulk of our investment portfolio there. Makes sense for us, YMMV.
Absolute bullshit. USD accounts as well as Euro accounts are absolutely normal here. There sole purpose is for the transfer of dollar currency and are used extensively for private and business purposes. CH is one of the few places to conduct a global business. Not many other banking Systems can transfer funds globally faster. Ever wonder why so many international companies have a mail box here.
I got lots of USD accounts, my business is about 90% in USD !!
Absolutely no problem having USD account in big banks or small cantonal banks
Just be careful that it's really in USD. I say that because I opened a Canadian dollar account with Valiant some years ago. It took me some months to realise that they just named the account "Canadian Dollars" but had converted it to Swiss franks.
I’m not sure what part of my statement that you are reacting to, because you appear to be agreeing with me.
The reaction is to your saying that the only people interested in having a USD account are only American citizens.
What about GBP accounts? Does it make sense to have them in CH?
IME at least one bank could handle incoming USD payments despite supporting USD accounts.
UBS is a safe bet. The cantonal bank also worked.
As of 2019, having an account in USD was totally doable at Credit Suisse. For ten years, we had one account in USD and one in CHF. We paid our US bills out of one and our Swiss bills out of another. But we were not trying to hide anything or do anything bad, mind you. We were paying our American factures out of the US dollar account and our Swiss factures out of the francs account.
I never said that. What I said was that while ‘American persons’ might represent a number of the people that have USD denominated accounts, it is not the account which is the problem, but their American personhood.
I just do my online business in US dollars. So wondering if I can get an account in US dollars (looks like I can).
Anyone try Raiffeisen?
I wondering then what would happen if I used the debit card from the account internationally?
Or perhaps a credit card?
Glad I started a neat thread.
Believe UBS may be better with the exchange rates and charges.
Here you can do a comparison: https://www.moneyland.ch/de/creditcard/list
You can open a USD account at Raiffeisen (as well as GBP). You get the full amount of any credit if sent direct to the USD account - unless the sender instructs your bank to pay the charges.
Same with sending money out - but like any forex transfer they make a charge.
I forget how much but if you need USD cash they also make a small charge.
FWIW; my experience was that UBS made it very easy to set up a real USD account and to pay in USD funds. In my case it was even USD paper "checks" (don't ask!).
One thing to watch out for though is the fees to maintain that account, they were incremental to the normal CHF account costs and proportionally much higher. My advice, if you don't need to routinely trade in USD change the money to CHF and close the account down after you have receive the money and processed it.
B
I looked into this recently. Yes, dollar accounts are a normal thing here (UBS, CS, even Migros Bank offer them). Problem is that if you pay into them with Swiss Francs, they give a poor exchange rate, and ditto if you convert from dollars to Swiss Francs. UBS even takes 3% off the top as charge for converting dollars to CHFs.
Solution: open a Wise account online. It's quick, easy and transparent. They also give good exchange rates. It's all done online. They are established (11 years now) and have over 10 million customers. I am quite happy with them.
is it then possible to perhaps send the money (in USD) free to a revolut card and then just spend the money wherever since Revolut gives almost exactly the spot Forex rate. thanks. or if you prefer you can switch it all to Swiss Francs on the app and spend in Francs.