Best online banking Switzerland

Which Swiss bank has the best online banking in your opinion? I do most of my banking online and haven't been impressed with my first Swiss bank. Opinions please?

Hi there,

There is no single "best" bank for online banking because which bank works best for you depends on which services you need. As a general rule, larger banks which can afford to invest more in developing online services may offer more services or more intuitive interfaces online - but there are many exceptions to this rule.

The most important factors when choosing a bank to work with are the fees charged and the interest earned. If you do all or most of your banking online, it is worth noting that many Swiss banks charge lower fees for online-only accounts and transactions. A number of direct banks (online and phone only) operate in Switzerland, and these often have very competitive fees and intuitive interfaces.

When you select the "Online banking only" option in the moneyland.ch private account comparison and the banking package comparison, the prices shown are those applicable to accounts which are handled entirely online with little or no in-bank, mail or phone transactions and correspondence.

Best regards from Moneyguru

I have had accounts at ZKB, Credit Suisse and Bank Cler. Surprisingly, I found the online banking from ZKB to be the most straightforward and hassle-free of these. I never had trouble with logging in, which I did have with Credit Suisse. Of course, it depends a lot on what you want to do, what types of accounts you use, whether you trade online, etc. But that is my experience.

I would say Postfinance for these reasons:

• The interface is clean and simple.
• Its eBill and e-finance services make paying online easy and many Swiss companies and online shops give you the choice of getting billed or paying with these.

My opinion anyway.

I would say do your research and then see if Postfinance is the best fit.

In the past it used to be quite good and stable but I get the feeling they are cutting corners on quality and on the programming efforts they are combining between outsourcing and internal employees.

When the system works it is perfect, flexible, nice, easy and practical but when NOT..well..can't say they care too much...probably there is no problem with job safety given it's not a fully private bank. Helpdesk is very polite but what can they do when the software is not completely polished (to be polite).

The partnership with Tata Consulting might be producing some visible effects aside from saving costs but who am I to know about that.

Second...they had a few outages where the whole weekend the e-banking was down (mostly planned maintenance but still..in the current time and day and in the developed world..is it possible for a bank to have its online service fully down during a weekend? no backup site? nothing able to run in parallel while they are working and testing on the other site to see if all goes well? maybe no comprehensive strategy around this or end to end vision as to how it should happen?)

They even had a real outage for all the ATMs on a Sunday 1-2 years ago and it lasted from 16:00 to 22:00. It never made it in the press (probably no reporter was using their service or all were away on vacation) but people were complaining on allestoerungen.ch of how they could not pay at a gas station, how no cards worked (except for credit cards that are not really from Postfinance) and even I experienced the same problem and had to go back home and pick my other card which was with another bank and thus worked. The problem passed as if nothing happened, never heard about anyone getting kicked out over it or even about it coming to pass (outside the few sites that others found to complain); it might have been just a collective bad dream and as in fairy tales when we all woke up ... it was gone.

Then their app....check out when you're not part of the majority iPhone customers what happens..since 6 weeks now...

It works perfectly on iPhone but on Android for a lot of people it just crashes on startup..needless to say no fix since then. Maybe Postfinance is an Apple reseller?

They are still working on the issue. Looks like no one does serious Q&A, the older version that worked on all Android versions was pulled out (so the only choice is the crashing and unstable version); everyone gets a constant excuse that they are working on it, they even released an update but of course it fixes nothing. This makes one wonder if any corrective measures are being taken..like replacing the people responsible for this failure, getting some help from the outside, tracing the errors in the code, reproducing the problem, testing patches. It should be fairly easy for a seasoned programmer (but those are not cheap) to get to the bottom of this.

On the Playstore they have a BOT programmed that answers JUST to 1 star reviews from time to time by just repeating some parts of the sentence (in case it can identify the issue as matching a keyword in its learning DB) and adding to call Support (randomly switching between English and German regardless of the initial language of the review). This makes up for funny experiments by playing with playstore usernames and by concatenating jokes or funny statements to the typical keywords it identifies and reuses in the reply.

If you don't believe me about the Android app...just open the Playstore and read the reviews..makes for a good bedtime story :)

Given this status and 6 weeks..no fix..would you trust such an App with your data and functioning on your phone?

This is something that only each one of us can answer and decide on a case by case basis.

There is also a review I found on the web (though it does not see anything critical..so I would say it's OKish):

https://www.immuniweb.com/mobile/?id=BPk1O7s6

If one really wants to see what's happening, then probably it would require attempting a man in the middle approach + trusted certificates + dumping the traffic that the app is passing through to see what it does + running it in a sandbox and tracing the system calls. Would make for an interesting self study and security evaluation of what you are installing even if just for curiosity's sake.

Would I trust my data to be safe on Android with something that crashes since 6 weeks especially since it's a banking app?

I don't know...this each user has to answer for himself.

At least on iPhone works, it's eye candy, practical, easy to use, nice...

All good insights indeed. I only have experience with the web-based online banking, not the mobile app. I use a combination of brick-and-mortar banking and online banking, and PostFinance is ideal for that. I haven't really needed mobile banking so far. The point about their online banking and ATM network outages is certainly valid.