Postfinance – one of Switzerland’s largest banks – has returned to offering passive retirement funds. The funds will be issued between August 18 and September 26, 2025. They are scheduled to become available to the public on September 26, 2025.
The PF Pension - Passive Fund will be offered in four different versions with stock components of 25, 50, 75, and 100 percent respectively.
What are the main features?
With the exception of the fund with a 100-percent stock component, all of the new retirement funds from Postfinance have a bond component, plus a Swiss real estate component of seven percent and a gold component of five percent.
An interesting feature is that the Swiss stock components are small, at between two and eight percent. While the Swiss components are larger than those of global stock indexes (typically 2 percent), they are very small compared to those of many other Swiss retirement funds.
The passive retirement funds from Postfinance are only available via online banking or the mobile app. Postfinance does not offer personal consultation in relation to its passive retirement funds.
Unlike Postfinance’s actively-managed retirement funds, the new retirement funds do not follow ESG or sustainability criteria.
How much does using the new Postfinance funds cost?
Postfinance aims to maintain total expense ratios (TERs) of between 0.74 and 0.87 percent per annum, depending on the fund. Because the TER is calculated and published in arrears, the actual costs will only be known in the future.
The table above shows that the annual TERs of these passively-managed funds are up to 0.43 percentage points lower than those of Postfinance’s actively managed funds. In other words, the active funds from Postfinance are 54 percent more expensive than its new passively-managed funds.
What does Postfinance say about its new funds?
Postfinance already offered passively-managed funds until May 2022. These funds were replaced with actively-managed funds, which resulted in a 30-percent cost increase. Postfinance justified the change by saying that the actively-managed funds could possibly yield higher returns, and highlighted their social and sustainable investment aspects.
In response to a moneyland.ch enquiry, Postfinance said that its move to actively-managed funds in 2022 was an attempt to meet customer demand for retirement funds focused on sustainable investments. According to Postfinance, customer needs and demands have changed since then. Postfinance says that by adding passively-managed funds to its lineup, it is filling an additional customer need for affordable index funds for retirement saving.
Which other established Swiss banks offer passive retirement funds?
Major Swiss banks that offer passive funds include Raiffeisen, UBS, and the Zürcher Kantonalbank (ZKB). But the share held by passive funds is still very low compared to actively-managed retirement funds. At UBS, passive funds had a share of just 5 percent in December 2024. At Raiffeisen, around 14 percent of assets in retirement funds sat in passive funds in July 2024. It is important to note that those figures only account for the share classes available to private customers.
Other major banks like Migros Bank, Bank Cler, and Valiant do not currently offer any passive retirement funds.
How do the new funds compare to robo advisors?
Unlike conventional banks, retirement mandates from Swiss robo advisors make heavy use of passive investment vehicles. Services like those from Frankly, Viac, and True Wealth have total annual costs of under half a percent. These retirement mandates have stirred up the market in recent years. Viac, a robo advisor that pioneered online retirement mandates, now manages 5 billion francs of assets. Frankly, a robo advisor from the Zürcher Kantonalbank, manages 4 billion francs worth of assets.
The graphic above, with its simplified cost calculation for a 10-year term, clearly shows that passive retirement funds are significantly cheaper than actively-managed retirement funds. The differences between service providers are very large, with the total costs for the cheapest solution coming to 1300 over 10 years, compared to 17,100 francs with the most expensive product.
Conclusion by moneyland.ch expert Ralf Beyeler
Using a passive investment strategy is generally preferable to using an active investment strategy. It is hypothetically possible for an actively-managed retirement fund to outperform a passively-managed fund, even after accounting for the fund’s fees. But very few actively-managed funds have been able to outperform market indexes over long terms.
Actively-managed products are more attractive for banks because the bank is able to charge higher fees. Because of that, many banks focus on promoting actively-managed retirement funds.
I find it interesting that Postfinance will only offer its new retirement funds via online and mobile banking. That means Postfinance is targeting customers with an affinity for digital banking. However, customers in that category would likely be comfortable with using retirement mandates from robo advisors, which can cost a lot less.
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